To me, touts are a symptom that even organisers got the ticket pricing wrong. I don’t see the problem with touts at all, yet everyone seems to disagree with me. Your thoughts?
In the US, they’re called scalpers, or more politely, ticket brokers. They serve a small market of people who don’t want to, or failed to for some reason, go through the normal process of buying tickets in a frenzy at the moment that they go on sale. I view them as providing a valuable service.
In the US touts are people who sell their inside info on winners at the race track.
People will find a reason to hate anyone, anywhere, who profits from trade. They always have, everywhere in the history of civilization. Yet trade goes on.
Ticket resellers perform a valuable service. (I prefer not to say “scalpers” because (a) it carries pejorative overtones; (b) it’s unfamiliar to non-Americans; and © tickets are sometimes resold below face value).
I’m most familiar with the economics of American sports events, for which most tickets (especially good tickets) are sold as season packages to people who want to attend most of the team’s games, or to corporations that use the events for business entertainment.
These buyers can’t attend every game—81 for baseball, 41 for hockey or basketball, eight for football. They benefit from selling the tickets they can’t use.
Conversely, people like me want to attend only a few games, but want and can afford to buy a good seat when we do so. We have money and want good tickets; the original buyer has good tickets and wants money. All we have to do is find each other, and ticket brokers or resellers help us do that.
Some people buy season tickets for the express purpose of reselling them, taking a chance that the team will be good and hoping to make a profit. I have no problem with that. It ensures a well-stocked secondary market.
The economics of concerts is different, with promoters having reasons of their own to price tickets below ultimate market value. I’ll leave it to others to explicate.
I’m not aware that the practice even carries much of a stigma anymore, what with the Internet making it more universal and helping to chase counterfeiters and hustlers out of the business. The law varies from state to state and country to country; here in Illinois, it has been used mostly to hassle small-time “street resellers” (often African-American) and funnel trade either to better capitalized storefront businesses or to the Internet. I don’t approve of this use of the law, but I don’t see it changing any time soon.