The Golden Rule: "Them that's got the gold make the rules."
Over my many years, I have gone to concerts to see such performers as The Mamas and the Papas, The Association, Jim Morrison and The Doors, Three Dog Night, B.B. King, Led Zeppelin, and so on. With the passing of the torch, my daughter recently let me know she wanted to go to a concert in Cambridge, MA, at a place called The Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub.
Trying to be a good father and earn some well-needed Father Points, I checked the website and found that members of the group's fan club could purchase advance tickets for $52 each (the price included some extra "stuff"). For the rest of us, advance tickets costing $17.50 each would go on sale at 10 AM that next Saturday; I only wanted two. Thinking I was a "savvy" consumer, I pre-entered my consumer information and sat in front of my computer waiting for 10 AM to arrive. At the right moment, I began refreshing my screen to be among the first to purchase tickets. In less than a second, a new screen appeared stating "Online Tix Have Sold Out." I did everything right, but I didn't stand a chance.
Massachusetts law does say basically that it is illegal to sell tickets at more than two dollars above face price, but that has been ignored and laughed at for years. Almost immediately, the tickets I tried to get for $17.50 showed up on reseller sites at prices ranging from about $80 to $160 each (as of this writing, I found some online for $95 to $270 each. I don't know if they are all the same, but the first one I looked at also added a "service charge" of an additional 18.5 percent). Does anyone else see something very wrong with this picture? How do these people sleep at night (probably very peacefully)? These are the same people who show up after a disaster and sell water for $10 a bottle and a flashlight for $100 because they can.
The short of it is that my daughter won't be seeing the group, and in spite of my best efforts, I didn't stand a chance. I looked up "collusion" ('a secret agreement between two or more parties for a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose') which seems to be what's going on, but it doesn't seem to be very secret. Anyone up for a class-action suit? Anyone?
