Earlier I started a thread about the Treasure Island Music Festival. One thing I noticed is that the only way to buy tickets is through Ticketmaster. The two day tickets are advertised on the website as $119.50, but clicking through to Ticketmaster once tickets are actually available shows a mandatory $17.50 convenience fee (as well as an optional fee depending on what delivery mechanism you choose).
In general I don’t have an issue with the Ticketmaster convenience fee (outside of believing that its magnitude is indicative of a market failure, namely a monopoly). It makes sense that if you want to avoid going all the way to the box office and rather buy online a third party company could offer that service at a fee, assuming the venue does not have the infrastructure for it. However that is not the case here: there is no mechanism to buy the ticket for just $119.50 without purchasing a $17.50 service from Ticketmaster. It strikes me as unusual that this is allowed, it seems blatantly dishonest. If I owned a grocery store with a big sign outside saying “Milk $1 a Gallon” could I tell people upon checkout that they had to rent a video for $2 from the video store across the road to get that price? I would have thought this deception would be illegal.
Based on my California location are there any laws that cover these scenarios? If the scenarios are handled differently, what makes them different?
From a non-GQ perspective these Ticketmaster fees always make me feel taken advantage of, and is part of the reason I rarely go to concerts anymore. The internet purchase service is such a standard these days (Amazon don’t charge you a $17 convenience fee on a $120 purchase, heck even the airlines don’t do that (yet!)) it is hard to imagine a free, competitive market allowing Ticketmaster to get away with such a large fee.
Actually, everything I’ve bought from Amazon has come with free shipping, although they do have the option to pay more for faster shipping. I guess that makes it “tomayto, hamburger meat” instead of “tomayto, tomahto”? What Amazon does not do is in addition to a shipping fee charge you a convenience fee, I guess in this case being analogous to the convenience of not having to drive to a Best Buy to purchase your item!
I’ll note that in addition to the convenience fee Ticketmaster does offer a range of shipping fees, including free shipping (standard first class mail it looks like). They do charge $2.50 for not sending you anything at all and having you print it yourself.
It’s not bait-and-switch, which is when you advertise a low price and then, when the customer asks for it, are either out of it or tell them, “it’s a real piece of crap,” and then persuade them to buy something more expensive. The equivalent in this case would be advertising the tickets for $119.50 and then telling customers, “Oh, sorry, they’re sold out; you’ll have to buy a $299 seat.”
In general, advertisements always leave out things like service charges, shipping charges, and tax.
I can understand tax (well, I’ve come to terms with it at least, given I am from a VAT based country where the price you see is the price you pay including tax) and shipping charges that reflect the actual cost of shipping. But service charges? What is allowed versus not allowed here? If I ran a store that sold televisions could I advertise $50 for a set and then at checkout add a $20 staff salary fee, a $10 store electricity fee, a $10 advertising budget fee, etc? It sounds like there is free reign to blatantly lie about pricing in advertising, but I’m not sure I understand how far that can be taken.
Uh, that’s where you’re wrong. Airlines very typically advertise one-way fares and exclude the flight segment tax and the security tax, and that’s not even touching the issue of baggage fees and so forth.
There are other ticket booking agencies out there that charge less in fees, but if a promoter wants to use Ticketmaster, you’re pretty much stuck with what Ticketmaster charges.
This is true. And while taxes are strictly speaking a little different they are somewhat obnoxious in their exclusion. I have to admit to being a little less observant on the airline front - I use services like Farecast (now Microsoft Bing), which give you the total cost up front (minus baggage fees, but I don’t check items usually anyway). So in my specific experience I actually do get an accurate cost up front when doing my price comparisons. But you are correct that airlines do advertise in less than honorable ways elsewhere.
Which, I would say, is fine. Advertise that price. If you advertise X as the price of Y, and there’s no way to purchase Y for X, then, well, you’re lying.
This is my position. In fact, I’ve gone through the process a little further and there is an additional order processing fee! So the ticket is advertised as $119.50 but the only way to buy it is as $119.50 + $17.50 + $4.45 = $141.45. I’ve chosen the free shipping option here, but they’d charge you an addition $2.50 to email it to you instead so you can print it yourself.
This just feels fundamentally dishonest. Of course, I can answer the “how do they get away with it question” myself: I’m still going to go to this show because I really want to see the artists. I’ve never been to a show that wasn’t sold out, so I and everyone else am tacitly endorsing this behavior. I bet the situation would be better if there were multiple ticket purchasing companies available for every venue.
I’ll have to save the letter writing for promoters of shows I’m actually going to avoid because of Ticketmaster. Like the “boycott oil companies by not buying gas on Thursdays” stupidity, “I’d want to boycott your show but I’m just too desperate to buy tickets” probably sends entirely the wrong message!
I might also question if there really was no other way to get the tickets at that price. One easy way around it is to hide in fine print 50 layers deep that all tickets will first be preferentially sold through Ticketmaster for “your convenience”, and that Ticketmaster has a first right of refusal to sell the tickets at any price above the listed price of $119.50. Of course, that could mean liquidating any unsold tickets to a broker for $0.01 over that price if they are desperate, or simply buying up all the tickets themselves and eating the cost. Either way, you create an illusion that there was some other once-in-a-billion chance that tickets might be available through some other venue.
Yeah, this kind of behavior annoys the crap out of me, too. I’ve eevn gone directly to the box office (it was not far from my office) to buy tickets to avoid the Ticketmaster fee, and been told that I had to pay a ticket issuance fee anyway.
So sometimes it is literally impossible to buy the ticket for the advertised price, and it ain’t because of government-imposed taxes or fees. How is this OK?
I’ve pretty much given up on buying tickets from Ticketbastard. I’ve had good luck waiting until a few days before the show and then getting them at face value (or less) on eBay or craigslist.
Complain to the California Department of Consumer Affairs and the Federal Trade Commission. I don’t know whether this specific practice is illegal, but these agencies routinely bring lawsuits for this kind of thing.
