Following on from my previous rant about TicketGouger (see blog passim), I’ve just seen all the PJ Harvey tickets on eBay — and no-one’s bidding on them at th

sdfsdf

I’ve ranted about TicketMaster’s price gouging in the past (see blog passim), but my blood is boiling once more from a fresh outrage, so I need to vent once again…

I’m trying to buy myself a ticket for An Evening with P J Harvey at the Beacon Theatre on 10 October, and the cheapest tickets at this all-seater theatre are $35. That seems pretty reasonable to me, since that money pays both the venue, all the road crew and an artist who I’ve wanted to see for some years.

However, the only way to buy a ticket without physically going to the box office is through TicketGouger — and they will add on an additional $9.60 “convenience fee,” and then on top of that, another “just because we can” $3.15 “order processing fee”! This amounts to $12.75 — 36.5% of the ticket’s cover value!

How can these fuckers justify this breathtaking level of extortion? If both the theatre and the artist can make money from $35 for actually doing something worthwhile (and probably quite costly to put on), how much profit are TicketGouger raking in for running a ticket ordering website, mailing tickets out and generally treating their customers with absolute contempt?

This time, I’m not going to be held to ransom — I’m going to buy my tickets at the box office on principle.

I’m in the process of switching the domain registrar for tonygill.com from enameco.com to godaddy.com (since at $7.15 for a year’s registration they’re less than half the price), but there may be a little time delay before the domain forwarding is set up properly — so if you try to e-mail me and it bounces, please let me know by forwarding the entire bounced message to TONYGILL99 (at) earthlink (dot) net.