This morning tickets went on sale to certain Minnesota Vikings games. Since my SO is a Packer fan I am interested in the Vikings-Packers game in December. Tickets to that particular game have not gone on sale yet, but they offered a package - buy a ticket to a preseason game vs. the Cardinals, and you can buy a ticket to the Packer game at that time. These went on sale at 10 am, and when my SO checked, they were all sold out. OK, fine, but how do they buy them all up so quickly?
And from what I understand, MN has a law that you cannot sell tickets for more than face value. But when I check the Ticket King website, they have pages and pages of Packer-Vikings tickets for sale, at five times the face value. How can they do this?
I can’t answer. I can only tell you how aggravating it is here in Chicago. There have always been scalpers outside Wrigley Field. The coppers used to occasionally shoo them away. You went down to the corner and bought your tickets. Usually cost a few bucks more than face value, but that was usually ok. Last few years, now that the field itself is the draw, the Cubs have gotten nasty about scalping. The cops are tougher. But - and here’s the really raw part - there are legal ticket brokers in the area. And one of those legal ticket brokers is actually owned - OWNED - by the Cubs. And god help the scalper who shows up anywhere near those legal scalpers. Or the guy who can’t use his tickets and is willing to sell them to someone for face value, or even less. They call the cops, who write tickets right there on the sidewalk. The Cubs, the brokers, and the cops are all on one team, and the poor schmoes (normal guys without $500 to spend on a restricted view seat) and the plain old regulars or scalpers are on the other team. Advantage - corporate Cubbies.
Laws on ticket scalping vary so widely from state to state and city to city that it’s difficult to generalize. With respect to Internet sales, however, MikeS is correct–no law applies to people operating from outside of the venue’s home state.
Concerning the Wrigley Field situation, as CC describes, Illinois law allows ticket resale at prices above face value only from a stationary place of business, not from the street. (I don’t know whether the city of Chicago might have a more restrictive ordinance concerning below-face sales.) The state law was originally written for “consumer protection”–long ago the circus would come to town, and barkers would buy tickets, walk to the edge of the fairgrounds, and sell them to unsuspecting rustics at above-face prices, even though tickets were still available from the box office. Like so many alleged consumer protection laws, this one now serves mostly for producer protection.
In addition to legal sanction, of course, the venue operator (in these cases, the home team) can restrict resale as a condition of contract, and confiscate or refuse to honor any tickets they catch you reselling at any price. Ordinarily, a team which is selling out its games anyhow has no economic incentive to do so, but if the Cubs are still running that in-house scalping operation, then they’re an exception.
Ticket King is based in Wisconsin, conveniently right on the border. Hmm. No way in hell am I paying $399 (or more) for a $98 ticket, so I guess I’m out of luck. How sucky that these places can buy up all the cheap tickets, go a few miles away into a neighboring state (about 35 miles from Mpls.) and resell for so much. :mad:
:mad: