Bob Collins
I’ve wanted to do a piece for some time about the effects of the legalization of ticket scalping in Minnesota, but KSTP beat me to it a few weeks ago, when the Hannah Montana fans got worked up because all of the tickets to a concert were gone within minutes, but the scalpers had ’em.
Still, I had to do my own research. Last Saturday, tickets for Bruce Springsteen‘s March concert in St. Paul went on sale at 9 a.m.. I forgot about it until 11, but it turns out that tickets were still available, proving that Hannah Montana is bigger than Bruce Springsteen.
Ticketmaster, it appears, tried a few new things, limiting the number of tickets you could buy, and giving you only one minute to buy them. This didn’t work out so well for me since in the process of buying them (a Christmas present for my wife), I had to go through the process of having Ticketmaster mail my account password to me, and then log back in, by which time the tickets were gone. And so were all the good seats. Take that, you scalpers!
Oh, and charging $95 for every ticket in the house (not including Ticketmaster’s “hey, go sleep on the pavement if you want” $10.50 convenience charge) probably kept tickets available longer.
In the end, I ended up with a pair of seats of questionable pedigree. But I had seats.
A check of Ticket King — the scalper that’s now legal — today showed that my seats are fetching as much as $300 each.
This law could destroy Christmas as we know it.
(Photo: Brad Barket/Getty Images)
