Buffalo Boy's Blog

If it was anyother band I probably would have said screw it, Im not going, but its the Hip, An evening with the Hip which will be a 21/2 to 3 hour show most likely. Luckily my wife was off from work today and managed to work both our laptops until she got through.

She got through around 10:45 this morning and landed me a ticket just outside of the "pit" at Artpark. At 10:00 AM if you tried to get through, the Hip's website had crashed due to all the traffic of fans trying to get through and get their first crack at presales.

Kudos to my wife for sticking it through and getting me one ticket. Yes thats right one. I refuse to pay more than $50 for a concert ticket anymore so I told her if they were more than $50 it will be just me going to the show. She didn't want to go to begin with so I would have bought the second ticket for no one in particular anyway.

This purchase pretty much insures that I will not attend opening day at the Dome though like I did last year, unless I get a nose bleed seat which I may still do.

Back to the ticket purchase. Tickets.com are theives. The ticket cost $59.50, okay by all standards a fair price to see a band who is in my mind anyway one of the top five North American live shows for 3 hours. But then I looked at the print out and there was two fees, surprise, surprise.

The first was a convenient charge of $8, I think they need to rename it to "an inconvenient charge". $8 on top of a $59 ticket? Thats almost a 15% tax ontop of the ticket price which Im sure they get a cut of anyway. Not to mention the fact that nothing of the ticket buying experience was convenient by all accounts. Most going to the show have day jobs, they have to work on Tuesdays at 10 AM that almost took me out of the equation until I found out that my wife was taking today off from work.

Lets face it, besides printing the ticket and putting in an envelope to mail it to the buyer, where is the convenience of buying a ticket through tickets.com or ticketmaster? No one does anything worthy of being called convenient besides charging huge fees on top of already expensive concert, sports and event tickets for a cash strapped public in a bad economy to buy.

Then there was the $3.25 "order processing fee". Okay, thats ridiculous. There is no one processing the order other than the computer and the customer typing in their own information. There really is nothing to process is there? What they have to take 20 seconds to deposit the tickets address side up into an envelope? Didn't we already cover that in the "inconvenient charge"?

After this, I am done. Im resorting to Thursday in the Square or Gateway Concert Series. No money other than for overpriced beers, which really, is beer ever overpriced?