interesting take from NYT's The Ethicist about reselling concert tickets
Posted by
prayformojo 🐵 (aka mayhem)
Jul 16 '23, 08:29
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My sister was lucky enough to get six tickets to the Taylor Swift concert in New Jersey for face value ($130) through Ticketmaster Verified Fans. She is using three of them for me, herself and my megafan daughter, and then decided recently to sell the remaining three. She looked at ticket prices online and seats in our section were being offered for around $3,000 each, plus the $900 in fees added on the last page of checkout.
She asked me to post them in a large Manhattan-moms Facebook group I am a member of for $2,400 each or best offer. I acknowledged that this was a bonkers price for these seats, but cheaper than the current market. We thought this was a win-win as people could go to the concert for less than they would pay through a ticket site, and we wouldn’t have to pay seller’s fees.
Instead, I got several angry messages and comments from strangers saying the price was unreasonable. One person asked what my sister paid for the tickets and said that it was wrong to ask for so much more than that original price.
As these tickets were for a fun, optional event and not anything essential like masks during a pandemic, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with profiting from them and charging market prices. Am I missing something? Do I owe strangers “reasonable” resale values? — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
Ordinarily, if you buy something, you’re entitled to sell it on, and to do so at whatever price the market has set. But the only reason you can resell a ticket at many times the original price is that the artist had decided to offer them for less than she could get, and so make them affordable to fans of more modest means. When people, or their army of bots, buy those lower-priced tickets in order to resell them, they’re abusing that restraint, and reducing the availability of seats at more reasonable prices.
That’s the case against Swift scalpers. But your sister didn’t buy these tickets to resell them. She just wound up with three she can’t use and had to distribute them somehow. People in your online community thus gained the opportunity to buy them for a good deal less than they’d be charged on, say, StubHub, though still a hefty sum. Had she offered them for close to what she paid and forfeited a steep markup, someone else might well have flipped the tickets and pocketed that profit. Besides, if the Manhattan moms didn’t like the price, all they had to do was not pay it. That’s how markets work. The trouble is that some members of this Facebook group, it seems, don’t think it’s an arena where market values should operate. As a member of the group, you should consider whether they’re entitled to this feeling — or whether they should shake it off.
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