Rochelle Johnson knew what was happening from the start.
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| Comedian Jeff Dunham with Achmed the Dead Terrorist performs during his performance Saturday at the Taylor County Coliseum. |
As expected, people were snatching up tickets in droves for the Jeff Dunham comedy show Saturday night at the Taylor County Expo Center. It's just that not all of those people were from Texas ... or the United States.
Some apparently devoted followers Dunham Windsor and Tecumseh, Ontario, Canada, were buying Dunham tickets in packets of eight. All of the purchase orders had the same last name on them, but with different first names and different addresses.
Johnson, the Expo Center's general manager, connected the dots. These Canadians had no intention of making the trip down to Abilene for a night of crass ventriloquism. They wanted, in all likelihood, to resell the tickets they had purchased at a higher cost.
For the Expo Center - and really, Abilene as a whole - this was virgin territory. Abilene has landed some decent-sized acts in the past decade, but none with quite the publicity footprint or wild popularity as Dunham. According to concert trade publication Pollstar, he's the only comedian whose tour can out-earn legendary musicians like Paul Simon and James Taylor.
So on the one hand, Dunham was a minor coup landing for the Expo Center. On the other hand, it has effectively Introduced Abilene harsh realities to the secondary ticket market of the.
It happens all the time in bigger cities. A top-flight act, say Bruce Springsteen, announces a series of shows. Tickets sell out within minutes. The culprits here are not just overzealous fans Boss: It's a whole army of secondary ticket sellers snatching up seats So They can flip them for a profit.
Until Dunham, and to a lesser extent, a Miranda Lambert show in April, Abilene has never had to worry about this sort of thing. But it was not long after the floodgates opened ticket that Johnson and the Expo Center staff started seeing Dunham tickets being hawked on the Internet for as much as $ 200 (versus a face value of $ 46.50).
"What's unfortunate is that people do not always pay attention to the web address," Johnson said. "Instead of going to the venue, they Google 'Jeff Dunham tickets,' and the first thing they go to is one of these ticket sites."
Johnson says there's not a lot that she can do to Prevent This sort of activity. The vendors purchased the tickets legitimately, Which means the promoters and the venue still get paid. But that does not make the ideal situation.
"Unfortunately, the customer is the one harmed," Johnson said.
But for a complete perspective of what's going on here, we need to talk to a secondary ticket vendor.
Hank Wendorf is the president of TicketSource.com, a Dallas-based company that has sold "premium event tickets" since 1992. Right on its website, the company notes that most of its tickets are resold above face value.
TicketSource.com focuses on tickets to sports events, Which in some respects are a "different animal" from other entertainment events, Wendorf says. But the basic principles of ticket brokering remain the same. And they're no more complicated than a first-year economics class.
"Every business is concerned with the buying and selling of goods," Wendorf said. "You buy at one price and sell at a higher price."
That's what does Wendorf with tickets, and he says it's nothing he has to apologize for.Because, as he points out, the buck stops with the consumer.
"The consumer has more control over the market than they realize," Wendorf said. "The price will only go to the point that people are willing to pay."
As far as secondary ticket vendors poaching tickets before the average fan can get to them, Wendorf says that venues have mechanisms to limit that sort of practice. They can reserve a certain amount of tickets for exclusive sale at their box office, or restrict certain ZIP codes from buying tickets during the initial sale.
In the case of the Jeff Dunham show in Abilene, the market more or less had its say. Due to the promoters' decree, every ticket to the Expo Center Coliseum was priced at $ 46.50, up from the nosebleeds to the front row. As a result, locals and out-of-town vendors alike gobbled up the prime floor seats in a hurry. But as of press time Friday, still there were large swathes of unsold tickets in the back corners of the coliseum.
Meanwhile, as the show date approached, online scalpers started to cut back on their demands in hopes of getting a return on their investment. A quick Web search revealed the week before the show that tickets were selling Dunham floor at a (somewhat) depressed rate of $ 50 to $ 100 One vendor ad on Craigslist even touted tickets for $ 1 at all locations.
So, did the free market win the day? Depends on who you ask. But the rise of online ticketing means that even Abilene venues will have to figure out how to manage their ticket sales.
"The secondary ticket market has given brokers the ability in Canada to sell tickets to a show in Abilene," Wendorf says.
And that about says it all
