Why is it illegal? You bought your ticket at a price set by the seller, what prevents you (aside from the law) from selling it at whatever price you want, being the rightful owner of the said ticket?
IIRC, the “excuse” is that the ticket is merely a “lease”. Just as you don’t have the right to sub-lease your apartment (in many jurisdictions), you don’t have the right to sublease your seat to the Miami Dolphins.
Scalping laws vary. Scalping (IIRC) is legal in New Hampshire. And according to The People’s Court, judge Wopner mentioned that scalping in California was illegal only on-site on the day of the event.
Thanks for the input. Seems a pretty flimsy excuse to me, and I would think its sole purpose would be to ‘regulate’ somewhat the market. I understand that restrictions or conditions can be attached to the subleasing of an apartment; it would appear - at least to me - a bit more difficult to try to justify attaching similar conditions or restrictions to the subleasing of a seat.
Scalping is illegal to allow people like you and me to purchase tickets. If it were legal, everyone that got through to a ticket agent would buy hundreds of tickets, knowing that they could make loads of money reselling them. The event would sell out before you or I could get tickets at the regular price, and we couldn’t afford to buy from the scalpers. So we don’t get to go.
But why is scapling profitable? That is, why are tickets to public events sold at a low enough price that people can make money reselling them? Why isn’t the original price jacked up to what the market will bear?
The established price takes into account overhead and what the producers believe will be attractive to enough people to fill the total number of seats.
The scalper targets a smaller audience.
Also, keep in mind that at most venues, there is a limit to the amount of tickets you can purchase, which holds especially true for concerts. This is done to reduce the amount of scalpage.
The scalping laws vary by state, but from my experience, the laws are rarely enforced.
In CA, for instance, during the '94 World Cup, I had tickets for one the games at the Rose Bowl. Along the surrounding streets, in the parking lots, and right in front of the stadium, it was scalper after scalper.
They were holding up signs, sitting in chairs, some even had makeshift booths setup. I mean, it didn’t really look like they were trying hard to conceal their activity. I don’t know how it is in other states, but the police here seem real lax on this law.
Only one problem with this. bizerta correctly stated that in California, it’s only scalping on the day of the event. The day before, a person can ask whatever outrageous sum he desires. The day of the event, he can only ask the face value.
In L.A., Dodger Stadium is right across the street from the Police Acadamy. And on game day, the scalpers are lined up and down Stadium Way in full view. I always wonder why they don’t get busted.
I heard that the way scalping works is that a company buys a bunch of tickets in advance, however not all the tickets to every game are used and the extra are sold to a ticket agency. The ticket agency sells what it can to the public and then sells the rest to the scalpers. This is how the scalpers make money off of tickets sold under face value.
The reason scalping is illegal I think is that the scalpers are competing with the venue for customers. The venue has already sold the scalped tickets and would like to sell walk up customers new tickets. Scalpers thus hurt the venue’s business and since the venues have more clout than scalpers do, some places ban scalping. This competition does not exist at a sold out game, but if there were different rules for sold out games it would be hard to justify the laws as being to protect the public.
The way I understand it, anti-scalping laws are straight out of various consumer-protection statutes. These would vary somewhat from place to place, but they seem to come from that area.
The idea is that if a new item has a price marked on it, then the seller cannot charge above that price. If Wal-Mart advertises a toaster for $20 and marks that on the toaster in the store, they cannot charge you a penny more than $20 at the checkout. (Wal-Mart cannot, but the government can tack on a percentage for sales tax, so you’re still going to have to pay more than $20. But I digress.)
The same principle applies to event tickets. The item has not been used (that is, the concert or game or whatever has not yet taken place), so the price marked on the ticket is the one to be paid. Since scalpers charge you more, scalping is illegal.
Occasionally, loopholes in the law–like, ticket agents are permitted to tack on a “service charge”–allow for what amounts to scalping. But scalpers who use this loophole tend to have much higher service charges than legitimate office-based ticket agents.
As always, caveat emptor!
The people that piss me off the most are the so-called “ticket brokers”. They piss me off for a couple of reasons:
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The term “broker”. A real-estate broker performs a valuable service - s/he consolidates listings of homes and shows them to you, so you don’t need to make hundreds of arrangements. A stock broker buys and sells stock for you because it would be impractical for everyone to deal directly with the exchanges or market makers. A ticket broker, however, performs no service for you - a ticket broker merely takes tickets from one group of people to make them available to another group of people who are willing to spend more money.
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The way the ticket brokers work. They employ people from all over the country to buy tickets (over the phone) for popular events as soon as they’re made available. These people use rapid dialers to try to contact any of the various ticketmaster offices around the country (many times the phones are busy due to the large number of people trying to get concert or sports tickets). They then consolidate and resell them. This is how they get around the 6 ticket/person rule. There was a story on ticket brokers several months ago on one of the TV news magazines (20/20 or nightline, most likely) and they interviewed both ticket brokers and the people they employed.
Ticket brokering is apparently illegal in NY, but legal in CT, because I hear radio ads on NY radio all the time from ticket brokers with CT phone numbers. One time the radio station even played a disclaimer saying that “the following announcement does not necessarily represent the views of radio station name”. Kill em all, I say… 
To continue point 1 of my last post, it might be argued that the service that ticket brokers provide is to trade convenience for money; that is, you don’t have to get up at 9am on a Saturday morning, or continually redial a busy number. However, in performing this service they do a disservice to the majority of people who are willing to get up early or make the time to call. And even if you successfully argue that they are performing a service, their compensation is way out of proportion for the service that is being performed.
There’s no valid reason for scalping to be illegal, as long as the tickets are legitimate & were originally purchased legally. If a buyer & seller agree on a price, it’s really nobody else’s business, just like if any other item were being sold.
The consumer protection argument is bogus. Protection from what? The chance to attend an event? Licensed ticket brokers are usually exempt from the laws.
Around here (FL) it’s legal to charge up to $1 more than face value. They do enforce the law, maybe not as strictly in some areas, but when there’s a major soldout sporting event there are usually some people busted. What kills me are the people who advertise tickets in the paper way above face value & often find themselves selling the ticket to an undercover cop. What a waste of police resources, not to mention a waste of the ticket, since it ends up going unused rather than sold to someone who wants it.
As far as concerts go, most of them don’t sell out around here, & it’s usually easy to buy them on the way in for less than face value (which is legal). I often see “scalpers” buying & reselling tickets to concerts- if face value is $50, they might pay $20 & resell for $40 or whatever.
What’s the point, aside from perhaps confirming that there’s nothing wrong with the general principle that reselling a good purchased at an agreed price between two parties is legal? Just make sure you resell it for a maximum profit of $1.
From being gouged, for one. Also from unethical business practices. And from seeing a price clearly marked on a good or service and being told something along the lines of, “No, even though it says it costs $50, I think you’re gonna have to pay me more for it today.” Which is exactly what a scalper does.
Consumer-protection laws don’t generally single out different kinds of goods or services (like the selling of tickets to events), but as things come up, they have to be fit somewhere. Ticket scalping, the selling of tickets over the marked price, tends to be lumped in with charging more than the consumer has been told for other goods and services.
That being said, I agree with you on the “if the buyer and seller agree on a price then there is no problem” part of the argument. I don’t necessarily like it, however, and I’d prefer not to have to push through crowds of scalpers looking for people to agree with them on my way to an event.
Nor do I see a problem with a reasonable service charge–especially if buying tickets over the phone from a licensed broker, you’re paying a little extra for the convenience. Who really minds paying $5 per $50 ticket in this case?
But living in a place where sports and other events do sell out, and sell out fast, it irritates me to see $40 or $50 tickets being sold for $300 and up. A $250 “service charge” for a $50 ticket goes far beyond reasonable, and becomes nothing but extortionate.
I’m not particularly fond of scalpers either (the ones that make you bleed, no pun intended). But I guess it could boil down to one simple question: Do you want it badly enough? Do you want it REAL bad?? Are you willing to fork an additional $500 a ticket to see your one and only idol, Barbra, sing one last time? You are? So be it: no harm done (so to speak). You aren’t? Just walk away with tears in your eyes.
News item from this morning reminds me that this doesn’t apply to physical merchandise - they mentioned on the radio that people were camped out at Best Buy to purchase the new Sony playstations as they came in, which are apparently such a hit that everybody knows they will be immediately backordered. They interviewed one guy who cheerfully admitted he intended to buy 3 and place them unopened on internet auctions as soon as he got home with them.
I tend to believe that laws attempting to prevent this sort of thing create more problems than they solve. Ticket scalping may be one exception, because of the time horizon involved - with merchandise like the playstations, if you’re willing to wait a while, Sony will ship more of them, and you will be able to buy one at the intended retail price - or less, if you’re willing to wait until they are no longer the latest thing and go on sale. With tickets, there’s a time limit for the event, and the market doesn’t get a chance to sort itself out. Also, it doesn’t take THAT much capital to be a big-time scalper and really mess things up.
I DO LOVE it, though, when some big event doesn’t sell out as expected, and scalpers have to eat their investment.
The one that REALLY seems like it would be profitable is selling your spot in line for hot automobile models. What kind of down payment / penalty for cancellation is involved here?
omni-not,
Exactly. It’s a simple (if expensive) lesson in economics: supply and demand determine price. As supply decreases, price increases to what the market will bear, and the scalpers are simply taking advantage of that fact.
Maybe the promoters should just boost the price to unreasonable heights to begin with, and eliminate the middleman.
As for Barbra, the scalpers would have to pay me an exorbitant amount to take the tickets off their hands.
It’s a rip off of the owner. He could have sold expensive seats but gambled not to. So I say let him suffer if he lost a few bucks. This is business, decisions are made- live with them.
Actually, we scalp tickets at church fund raisers all the time, buy selling them at raffles and auctions and keeping the excess paid over the cost.