I just managed to get my Darren Criss tickets for June, mostly because I'll be celebrating my golden birthday soon, and I wanted to buy myself something fun for it. It's not quite on my birthday, but it's close enough that I can count it as such, and since I love Darren Criss more than any other celebrity/actor/musician/somedays even person on the planet at the moment, this seemed like kismet.
So, I stood there, refreshing every five seconds, waiting and waiting for the tickets to become available at 10 AM sharp. And lo-and-behold, 10 AM came up, and suddenly, every single ticket was sold out. Now, I'm not what you'd call a strong mathematician, but it seems to me that it would be in the realm of impossible that every single ticket sold out in the course of two seconds. I get that that's theoretically possible, but I find it highly improbable. Granted, Criss is a very popular act, but we're not talking about the Super Bowl here, or the Olympics, where there are millions upon millions upon millions of people that are trying to purchase tickets to the event and I can buy that it literally could sell out during the click of a button, and I just missed it by microseconds.
The reason I have trouble believing this is that I went on over to StubHub immediately afterwards, and lo-and-behold, they had roughly 150 tickets for sale, all of which were 3-4 times the asking price (one was over 10-times the asking price, and because of the chutzpah it takes to mark a $25 ticket for $360, I'm going to keep him out of this conversation, as there's clearly some sort of Gordon Gekko-obsession going on there that's not worth the time it would take to figure it out).
Listen, I get supply-and-demand, I really do, and clearly the supply for these tickets was great enough that people would pay these exorbitant prices. In fact, based solely on the panicky reasoning in my head (and my utter devotion to Darren), I was one of those people, so I pretty much proved their point, but there should be something better than this. The venue for these tickets doesn't get more money as a result of this and the artist certainly doesn't get more money as a result of this. I think people would feel better if either of those were the case (Darren Criss provides me with free entertainment every week, and I've more than gotten my money out of his EP through the years, so I'd feel fine giving the cash over to him for the performance).
No, these are people that contribute nothing to the process except to make a profit, and that's wrong. I know it's legal in most places, but honestly, what is the difference between people who buy tickets with the sole intent of scalping and a pimp? They both exploit the work of others for their own personal gain. They know that they'll make the money back, but they have contributed nothing of meaning or value to society. When a pimp does this, we consider it reprehensible. When banks and mortgage companies and credit card companies do it, Congress acts out against it. So why is there such a push to legalize such a heinous practice.
I get that there are arguments against it, and quite frankly, I tend to agree with some of them. There are people who buy tickets and suddenly their flight is cancelled because the Republicans made so many budget cuts to the TSA that I missed my flight to New York and didn't get to see Cinderella (...as a hypothetical). Or people who find out they have to be out of town or are sick or get dumped right beforehand and don't want to go on what would have been a date alone (...again, as a hypothetical). But these circumstances are relatively rare, and the small window we have opened to try to make these circumstances and re-sales legal have caused the entire ticketing process to be exploited to such an extreme that it's really not worth it.
In fact, I'd personally be okay with those circumstances if you had to sell the ticket for face value or lower. That would remove the exploitive aspect of the practice, and would mean that in those rare circumstances, you could potentially get your money back. Admittedly, this would be more difficult to enforce on an individual basis, but it would remove from the equation the mass-level scalpers like StubHub or GoTickets.
Will this experience spoil my opinions of Mr. Criss or make me less excited for the concert? Not a chance. But it did make me change my way of thinking on a subject that I'd long been fairly apathetic on, if not favoring its legalization. It's sometimes good for these things to happen, if only because it makes you more aware of where all people are coming from, and occasionally it's a good idea to rethink or even alter your views on a topic. Of course, hopefully it doesn't happen too often, as my savings account may not be speaking to me as a result.
And, so that we don't leave with a bitter taste in our mouths, here's a couple of my favorite Darren Criss funny face pictures to keep us in a happy mood.
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