I must say, seeing this in the Houston Chronicle this morning just really rubbed me the wroooong way...
Tickets are sold out, fans are in tears and parents are in an uproar. Sound like a Duran Duran tale from the '80s — or N' Sync in the '90s? No way. There's a new tour furor, and it's over 'tween sensation Miley Cyrus, star of Disney Channel's Hannah Montana.
Her Nov. 11 show at Toyota Center sold out Saturday in five minutes. Now the only way to get tickets is at inflated prices from ticket brokers or individuals.
*snip*
Among parents dismayed by the fast Houston sellout and subsequent price gouging is Sandra Isget of Groveton. Having promised her 8-year-old son she'd get tickets, she wound up paying $629 for two seats to a Bossier City, La., show via Ticket Exchange, a service of Ticket Master, which allows fans to sell or buy among each other.
"I didn't trust eBay, because you don't know who those people are," Isget said.
Now she's having buyer's remorse.
"It was supposed to be something light-hearted and fun, and it's turned into something more expensive than our monthly mortgage," Isget said. "My son has no knowledge of us going into credit-card debt to get the tickets. I thought it would be worth it — that it would compensate for my own mental anguish — but it leaves me with such a bad feeling. I'd promised him. How far am I willing to go to keep that promise. If I refused, that only hurts him."
She prooomised him. Oh, the humanity!
Good grief. Is it wrong of me to say that I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for people like this? I believe the phenomenon seen described in those last three paragraphs is known as letting your mouth write a check your ass can't cash -- although, to be fair, the lady didn't say she couldn't afford them, just that she'd be going into debt. But still, if they can't afford the tickets at whatever price they end up having to pay, well, that's life. And maybe if she'd been as aware as she should have been, she wouldn't have made that promise -- although she really shouldn't have made it so blindly in the first place. I don't really care for the scalping phenomenon myself, but if ~$315 a seat is what the market will bear, well, that's life. It's full of disappointments, but I think we all learned that right about the time we learned to talk and dealt with it accordingly. Were I to come face-to-face with folks like the above-quoted mother, I'd be sorely tempted to say, "you should have known better, quit your whining, cowgirl up and deal with the choices you made." Call it callous or cold-hearted, but it's what I think.
|