Ok, I am new to this forum...good forum...just finished reading a thread about rich whiney hipsters in DC (one of my all-time favorite things to hate), and then a thread with pictures of cute things, and then I posted my first post, which was telling someone who was looking for Matt & Kim tickets about the massive crush I used to have on Kim when we were at Pratt. So hot.
So anyway, I've never been to the 9:30 club, but was googling to find a video of a Dodos song to send to my GF, and happened upon the information that they're playing this Sunday. Tickets are a mere 18 bucks, which is lovely for me, since we're completely dead broke and trying to save. I go to ticketfly to buy the tickets, and there's a $4.75 "service fee" for each ticket, plus a $4.00 "order processing" charge. Nearly the cost of a third ticket. First of all, that's some sheisty stuff, and secondly, can I presume that all this extra money is charged (instead of rolled into the cost of the ticket) so that its some chunk of revenue that the company doesn't have to share with the band? I can't imagine that any venue or ticket retailer is benevolent enough to give the full face-value of the ticket to the band, and these fees are the only revenue that the venue/ticket sellers make. Is that the case? If so, I'll buy the tickets right now...but I imagine that there are a lot of hands in that jar aside from just the band, and then on top of it, these places are charging more money separately. Its not that I'm SO broke that I can't afford the fees, its just bullski. And disappointing.
Don't get me wrong, I go to a couple dozen O's games a year, I know all about all the b.s. fees that places like ticketmonster and others tack onto the price of things...its just...disappointing. Greed, greed, greed.
I know it does not cost $4.75 to enter one line of information into their database to record the sale, and it does not cost $4.00 to print a tiny piece of cardboard with a barcode (do 9:30 club tickets have barcodes?), and so I'm not going, because I'm cranky and because if restaurants started charging a $6.00 "napkin fee" and a $5.00 "ice processing" fee, I would tell them to go piss up a rope, a la Ween. And yeah, I know, I pay $20 for a $13 steak, and blah blah...I can't imagine that for every two tickets sold ($13.50 in fees for buying two tickets), that the hundreds of dollars (thousands?) generated in fees is not excessive for the fact that I'm not dealing with a customer service rep that needs to be paid $12/hour, and the 9:30 club isn't paying $400/hour in electricity, and...its just greed.
Flame away as you may feel necessary. Its just a shame, that talented artists that are trying to make a living, are going to lose out on however much of the $36 would have gone to them for gas money or a late night snack, because of the greed of the venue and ticket-sellers. Instead, I'll be spending $36 on whatever of their merch I can find, and hope that they get a good cut of it...unless there's a $7.00 "cotton storage" fee for buying a tee shirt...
