[firstdown]

Originally Posted by Mc2guy

The Skins should take a lesson from the Cubs, another storied organization plauged with recent mediocrity, yet with a loyal and affluent fan base. The cubs sell all or most of their seat for certain non-season ticket sections, through a website, but it is open access.

Anyone can get online, wait in a lottery, and if you get picked you can buy tickets for any game/any section available, up to a certain limit on the number of tickets. With this approach, the brokers can bid, but are limited on the number of tickets, and true fans know they can get in the online lottery and have a great shot at getting a couple of seats to a game.

The team wins because they actually sell more tickets this way than forcing bundled tickets on people. The Redskins approach is similar to what Enron was doing in the energy sector, they are hiding the true demand by creating an opaque market. The fact they tell you that there is a huge waiting list is just a way to artificially bolster demand in order to coerce folks into buying bundled tickets.

What is interesting is that I think the strategy is actually counter productive. There are a ton of folks out there who would gladly pay the team to see a game who stay home due to the difficulty in procuring single game tickets. Its money left on the table that they could be getting. Instead they have to sell to brokers who really don't want all the tickets they have to buy and end up offloading many at less than face value, or not at all. Notice that for most home games there are many many seats unoccupied, yet the team claims a sellout?!?!? Those are tickets that got sold to a broker but not to a fan...if a fan's butt ain't in the seat, it isn't a sell out.

Well if the demand is so dam high for single game tickets why could I not sell the tickets to games I did not want to go to for my cost? The demand is not what people say it is and I think its because they have been just 50/50 for so long. Heck I had to sell a couple for about half what I paid and thats one of the reason I gave them up because I could not sell my extra tickets. I know this was true for a bunch of people because we have discussed it here several times. My seats were in the upper deck about 10 rows up on the 45 yard lines and I thought they where great seats. So its not like I was stuck in bad seating.