I bought tickets to a Brad Williams show in Feb. and one of the terms and conditions was that attendees are obligated to purchase 2 food or drink items. Why?
It makes sense for a free show, or festival appearance (i.e. a beer garden sort of thing) but buying tickets ($30 for “VIP” seating, which is basicalyl 4-person tables near the middle of the room) already makes the show valuable and, theoretically, pays for the comics time.
Also, any tips or advice are welcome, as this will be my first time attending a club-style show (been to a couple of arena shows, but think those are run a bit differently).
Same idea. You don’t want to have to buy food and drink, tell the management, and if enough people do the same, there will be no food/drink rule, tickets will be $50 to cover the lost revenue, plus food and beverage tax because the venue might have to pay it whether it serves refreshments or not, and no one will be any different except the folks who might have made a little money cooking for, pouring for, or serving you.
Perhaps you might try television. Comedy/night clubs have a long history of doing what you’re complaining about. They may not immediately reform.
The cover charge, or ticket price, goes (mostly, if they’re lucky) to the entertainer. The food/drink minimum goes to the establishment. So it’s a way of covering their own asses, to ensure the comic doesn’t sell 100 tickets to a bunch of sober people.
This. Lots of entertainment venues operate this way. Live venues that serve food and liquor make their profit on what they sell, not what tickets bring in. Movie theaters may have to give 90% of the gross to the studio the big opening weekend, so they need to push the concessions.
Places that don’t have options to make aftersale money, like auditoriums and live theater, are the ones who raise ticket prices extremely high because they have to cover both entertainer and venue.
Yeah, that’s a given. One of the comedians I follow on youtube (Steve Hofstetter) does a lot of heckler clips so I know that never ends well and just pisses off the rest of the audience.
Okay, that explains it. I thought the ticket cost was going to cover both venue and entertainer.
They have to book a comic every weekend. Some are hotter than others. The ticket price usually reflects that. On top of that they sometimes have to “paper the room” which means give out a lot of free tickets if sales are down. They need to at least get some money in from food and drink.
The comment above about “paper the room” is a good point
Many tickets are given out by radio stations and others
Also it is just part of the physiology of sales. if the tickets were $50 for a certain show some people would not buy them because that seems too much at the time. $35 seems easier and when you get the two drink minimum later it might not seem so bad to some as they were going to most likely have a drink.
A lot of thought has gone into how you are charged in almost every business. that said everything changes.
Some clubs stop the practice and eventually it will go away. Everything changes.
That is also why many of you make what you made ten years ago because somebody will do it cheaper or almost for free. We used to charge people to make records (still do some) but people do them on their phone now.
It also guarantees that a lot of servers are not getting paid to stand around and do nothing (and mad about it, because they get paid less than minimum, since they are supposed to make it up in tips and a percentage of the order). It’s easier to predict how many people will attend, based of sales before the event, and how well the comic has done in other venues (and what else is going on in other places), than how much food and drink n number of people will order, without a minimum. So you know how many people to schedule to work that night.
I used to work in a bar showing movies, but we showed that same movies in another venue, so the people who saw it in the bar were choosing that venue, and went with the intention of ordering drinks at the least. It had a full kitchen, and for the first show, most people ordered a meal. We showed in the non-bar venue first, so we had a good idea of numbers to give them for the night. There was no minimum, because it was so easy to predict the orders for the movies, but when the bar scheduled comics for one night only, they had a minimum, and I asked the owner why once, and that was what he said was different about the comics and the movies.
FTR, the servers at this place got paid about 2/3 of the local minimum, plus all their tips, and 10% of the tab, so on busy nights, they did pretty well.
