One thing I have never been able to figure out: why is ticket scalping illegal? You can sell your car to anyone. You can sell cupcakes that you’ve baked to anyone. So why aren’t you allowed to sell tickets to anyone, albeit at a slightly inflated price?
Thank you in advance to all who reply 
I think it’s illegal only if you do it on the property of the place holding the event. Why, I don’t know.
You might want to look at this earlier thread on Why is Ticket Scalping Illegal?
Since some people get upset by it, some jurisdictions have tried to make it illegal, but that’s hard to do. The justification for doing it on the event property is a little easier, since there are arguments that it confuses patrons, etc.
If you’re asking why some people get so upset about it, I can’t figure that out.
Take a look at the link given above, and you’ll get a whole load of reasons.
One reason that nobody mentionned is that scalping tickets creates inequity - that is, someone might pay $125 for a good seat, and someone might pay $300 for a crappy seat from a scalper. That would piss people off.
In addition, excessive scalping may create an unstable market - that is, when the tickets go on sale, they’re advertised for a certain price. Consumers in first-world countries aren’t used to haggling or nebulous value, and it irks them to pay $300 for a “$125 value.”
Finally, it discriminates against people who aren’t available at the time when tickets are released. If tickets go on sale in the daytime, those who are not employed during the day have unequal access to the tickets.
Now, I’m not saying these are good reasons, I’m just saying they’re potential reasons.
What are you talking about here? Scalping gives people access to the tickets that they could not get because they could not buy tickets through the normal channels.
If some “PC scalpers” were able to get between Dell and its customers, e.g. by somehow buying all Dell PC’s, which would lead to people paying a LOT of money for a Dell PC, don’t you think Dell would be a bit upset? Don’t you think they might try to push for legislation to make this illegal? Also, wouldn’t people buying Dell PC’s be upset?
Why should the middleman get any profit that could go to the producer, or be passed on to the consumer?
The issue at hand is that there is a fixed number of tickets, and the demand is almost infinite. For a lot of events you could still have all your seats filled well after selling it at $5K a ticket. That is not good for anyone, since this will effectively kill the market after a few events.
Right. And allowing scalpers to buy up as many tickets as they can, only to flip and resell them at exorbitent prices, makes a mockery of the face value of the ticket.
There’s lots of different anti-scalping laws, each aimed at a slightly different goal. Two examples:
Laws against marking up the price of the ticket are generally aimed at driving out scalpers by limiting their profit margins, thereby allowing consumers to purchase the good at the price set by the event organizer.
Some laws prohibit scalping on or near the grounds of the event. Part of these laws is undoubtedly aimed at allowing people to try to get to the box office to buy their own ticket, rather than have aggressive scalpers bully people into buying their tickets (i.e., sort of like the exact opposite of aggressive panhandling: “These are the last two tickets anywhere, there’s none at the box office, by the time you get back they’ll be gone unless you buy them right now for $50 a pop.”)
groman got it.
The point is that demand (at least for many events) far exceeds supply, and scalpers would make that market very “efficient”, ie only the very rich or those on expense accounts could afford to go to live events.
There is a fair play societal issue here that when demand far outstrips supply we’d rather use a lottery-like method to determine who gets ticket and who doesn’t. Society prefers that outcome, and many venues and certainly sports teams who sometimes, but not always, sell out prefer that outcome.
Hence techniques like the sales lines open at some unannounced time after 3 pm on a given day. All the tickets are sold by 3:03 to whomever was lucky enough to call at the correct moment.
This happens all the time with airline tickets, and people seem all right with it. If you buy your ticket the day of the flight, you’re going to pay a lot more than if you’d bought it 2 months in advance, and it’s still going to be a worse seat.
I doubt that’s really true. Just look at the price that tickets actually go for on ebay, and you’ve found the true market value. Actually, if all tickets were auctioned off, they’d be less that that, even, because the supply would not be as limited.
The reason that demand seems so high is that tickets to most events are priced below market value. The demand for lots of things would seem insatiable if they were priced too low. Scalpers are just taking advantage of poor pricing decisions. If they just increased the price of tickets, scalping would go away.
This is correct. I think most musical acts as well as sporting events set their prices below market value. First of all, they don’t want to have the negative publicity which goes along with high ticket prices. They don’t want the local paper or tv news to show the long time fan who can’t afford to go to the event.
With sporting events, the teams don’t like to have variable pricing for every game. A Cubs ticket on sale in April for a game in late September may be $40.00. If the Cubs are in a tight postseason race, that ticket will have greater demand and should be should for a higher price. If the Cubs have been eliminated, the scalper may end up having to sell the ticket under face value. The $40.00 that the scalper bought the ticket for is a sunk cost. The scalper would rather recover $20.00 for that ticket than nothing. If the Cubs are doing well, then that ticket might go for $400.00. For sporting events, a lot of scalper tickets are bought from season ticket holders who can’t make a certain game.
Ummmm . . . this already happens. Why do you think concerts sell out in less than 2 hours? Because ticket companies buy up the tickets (e.g. Barry’s Tickets) or exclusive contracts (e.g. Ticketmaster) that make you pay a surcharge for tickets.
It’s interesting that you picked Dell. Every other PC brand is already sold through middlemen, and it seems to work OK.
These sound like good reasons why the sponsor or owner of the event doesn’t want tickets resold. I really don’t see any reason why the governmental police power should be involved.
It’s the same reason that free-market economics are left to run their course, except for when monopolies develop, at which point government controls step in. It’s only possible for touts to sell on tickets at vastly-inflated prices if the normal supplies have sold out. At this point, resellers have a monopoly, and sky-high prices are the result. Making resale illegal (or making it a condition of sale of the ticket, and vigorously enforcing it - as happened with tickets for the Ashes over the past few weeks, where tickets identified on eBay were cancelled and resold), prevents this monopoly.
I can think of a couple of reasons why, but these are related to European sport and some of the problems we have, especially in soccer.
It’s been standard practice here for decades to ensure that fans from opposing teams are kept apart.
This means that teams have areas of the ground designated to their fans, and tickets are sold through the agencies of both the teams that are playing.
By having ticket sales regulated in this way, both sets of fans are kept apart and the chance of violence is reduced, the scalper - or as we call them ticket touts, don’t care one mite for all this, they just want to sell to anyone with the money.
The chances of having opposing fans meeting within a venue increases greatly.
I wonder just how much tax these scalpers are paying on their profits, I’d be extremely surprised if they paid anything at all, whereas ticket agencies will be accountable.
Well, not really. The tickets are a monopoly to begin with… you can’t exactly set up your own stand next to a stadium’s ticket office and sell your own tickets to the game.