This note seems relevant to this group.  Probably would have been more
relevant 11 months ago, but......at least it beats the bernic pachecko
stuff and the border war flame fest.
charlie
 
> Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 13:05:00 -0500 (EST)
> From: Nev Dull <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask] (/dev/null)
> Subject: Actually, Joe said he'd handle them for three bucks.
>
> From: "Joe Lavin" <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Those of you who remember my "hockey seems to be just a bunch of guys
> skating in circles" column from last year know that I'm certainly not the
> biggest hockey fan in the world. Nevertheless, my roommates wanted to see
> a hockey game before moving out of Boston, and so I found myself buying
> tickets for another Bruins game at the Fleet Center. This piece about it
> originally appeared in The Boston Tab in a different form.
>
> Getting Fleeced at the Fleet
> by Joe Lavin -- http://joelavin.com
>
> I tried ordering Boston Bruins tickets recently, which is always
> good for a laugh. There I was trying to order tickets over the
> phone from Ticketmaster when I must have hit a wrong number.
> Suddenly, the friendly computerized voice told me that the price
> of my three tickets was $437.30. "Please press 2 to cancel your
> order." The voice reminded me politely. Never in the history of
> telephones has the number two on a telephone ever been
> pressed quicker.
>
> Apparently, I accidentally asked for "the best available tickets," and so I
> almost ended up with $75 tickets. Added on to this was a $65 "facility"
> fee so that I could eat in special upper class restaurants. This fee also
> allowed me to have waiters bring me food. (After all, when you think
> hockey, you think waiters.) And then there was also a $5.25 "handling"
> fee. Multiply the total by 3, add on a mysterious $1.55 service fee, and
> you come up with $437.30 -- not to mention an overdrawn bank account.
> It all works out to $2.43 per minute of hockey action. I could probably
> telephone Antarctica for less.
>
> Eventually, I regrouped and ordered the "cheap" seats. For those, the
> price is $25 which only seems cheap when compared with all the money I
> almost spent. Of course, due to some strange law of mathematics that
> only applies to sports ticketing, those three $25 tickets actually cost
> $92.30. Again, the extra money is for "handling," meaning my $25 tickets
> cost $30.77 each, or $0.51 for every minute of hockey. And that's not
> even counting the $6.75 I paid for a hot dog and a coke.
>
> The handling is what confuses me the most. It's not as if the tickets were
> actually sent to me. I still had to pick them up at the Will Call window. If
> anyone should have gotten a handling fee, it should have been me. The
> only handling that the Bruins conducted was when someone transferred
> the tickets from one room of the Fleet Center to another. I'm thinking of
> going into ticket handling myself. It sounds like quite a lucrative
> business. Perhaps I could even grab a foothold in the market by
> undercutting the Fleet Center's prices.
>
> "And that'll be $5.25 for handling, Sir."
>
> "Actually, Joe said he'd handle them for three bucks, so that won't be
> necessary."
>
> "Oh, okay. . . . Let me just subtract that from the total."
>
> All this, of course, is not much of a surprise, but I'm not sure what can be
> done about it. Sure, we could all boycott the games until the prices go
> down, but that won't work unless we get the big corporations to join in.
> They, after all, are the ones buying all the expensive seats and thus
> keeping the prices high. Increasingly, they're also the ones who own the
> teams.
>
> I know one person who suggests that we all join together and boycott
> the games on television as well. That way, Nielsen ratings will drop until
> the teams start asking reasonable prices for tickets. But of course
> something like that takes dedication, and I'm not sure whether most fans
> could actually avoid their local sports teams. I'm not even sure if I could,
> but perhaps we'll find out if it's possible later this week when the NBA
> returns from its FANtastic lockout.
>
> By the way, ordering by phone is apparently the worst way to get
> tickets. My seats as usual were up high in the balcony. That's where I
> always end up at the Fleet Center. Not only do I get stuck in the cheap
> seats, but I usually end up with the worst of the cheap seats. Once,
> during a Celtic game last season, my friend Mark was complaining about
> a foul called on Antoine Walker until I reminded him that there was not
> one single person in the arena further from the play than him.
>
> I usually consider my seats to be good if I can find at least one person
> sitting further from the action than me, so this time I struck gold. Yes,
> there were two entire rows of seats behind me. I don't think I've ever had
> it quite so good.
>
> ____
>
> My previous column about hockey is running now at College Club. The
> address is:
>
> http://www.collegeclub.com/campus/sports_recreation/
> _________
> Copyright 1999 by Joe Lavin
>
> Joe Lavin's Humor Column is published every
> Tuesday at:
>
> http://joelavin.com
>
> For a free subscription, send a message to:
> [log in to unmask]
>
> In the body of the message, please type:
>
> subscribe humor-list your e-mail address
>
> To unsubscribe, type:
>
> unsubscribe humor-list your e-mail address
>
> As long as you include my name and web site address, feel
> free to forward this column all over the place. And if
> you enjoy my column, why not let your local newspaper
> or magazine know about it?
>
> Comments? Subscription problems? Just want to say hi?
>
> E-mail me at [log in to unmask]
>
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.