TW: Norris' piece brings up several issues. One, those damn convenience fees one faces now when ordering tickets. As Norris points out why would a fee vary in cost by ticket value? But generally paying 10% and more for a fee on a ticket is merely a disguised base price component. We are becoming a fee soaked society (check out the details on a rental car bill next time! or almost any travel related bill). Fees are becoming ubiquitous and barely disguised base price components. I hate them.
Next, I certainly would not want to be the Yankees or Mets opening gold plated stadiums amidst the great contraction. Baseball should be interesting this year. Baseball has no salary cap unlike football and basketball where teams are limited in their spending but also obligated to spend just about the cap amount. Baseball teams have been increasingly careful with their dollars as the off-season progressed. I fully expect attendance to be off significantly. For those of you who attend games you know how expensive games are with the tickets being almost an afterthought compared to sky high concessions, parking etc. I really feel for folks trying to take kids to the games. There may be some very unhappy owners and players used to living the good life by mid-season.
Finally sports teams have become very good at squeezing the last penny out of their seats. Long gone are the days when all games regardless of the time of year or opponent were priced the same. Now April tix are far cheaper than those post June and the series against say the Cardinals at Wrigley Field are far more expensive than games against the Giants. This pricing makes economic sense and replaces much of the value scalpers extracted previously. Of course this year teams may need to deploy their micro pricing in reverse to put some fannies in the seats.
From Floyd Norris at NYT:
"This is the year that both the New York Yankees and the New York Mets open new stadiums, with fewer seats than the stadiums they replace. Both also have raised prices to levels that only an unlimited expense account could appreciate.
Will it work? Will some tickets go unsold because no one will pay the prices being asked? If so, will the teams act like airlines, selling tickets for what the market will bear at big discounts?
It’s a fair bet that when baseball executives designed the stadiums they did not expect Lehman Brothers to vanish. Nor did they anticipate the bailout backlash. (How do you feel about bankers partying in seats that cost more than $2,000 each?)
I received an e-mail message today from the Yankees proclaiming that “Tickets for Yankee Stadium’s inaugural week are still available.”
So I checked out the second home game of the season, on Friday afternoon, April 17. The cheap seats are sold out, but there are still some good seats left, at prices ranging from $375 (plus a $12.45 convenience fee) to $900 (plus a $23.45 convenience fee).
As it happens, the Mets are in town that same night. There you can get tickets for as little as $60 (plus $7 fee) for seats in what I would have called the bleachers but they call left field reserved. Seats costing as much as $270 (plus a $12 fee) are also available.
Let me know if anyone notices the teams cutting prices to fill seats.
And while I’m complaining, can anyone explain why the fee for buying an expensive ticket online should be higher than the fee for buying a less expensive one?
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/this-is-the-year-that-both-the/
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