Freedom in the "Free Market"

Not too long ago I was looking for events that I could take my new girlfriend to see. I mentioned an upcoming Jackson Browne concert at Bass Concert Hall in Austin, and it went over well. When I tried to find tickets I found out that the way things work here is that all the concert tickets are snapped up as soon as they go on sale and then re-listed on one of the online ticket exchanges, such as Ticket City or Stubhub.

Having mentioned the show I felt obligated to follow through. I would end up purchasing two $74.00 face tickets at a multiple of the face price. Now, I had the money at the time, I had the girlfriend at the time, everything's cool. Midway to the concert, I no longer have the girlfriend. So, not being that great a fan of Jackson Browne, I decided to look into selling the tickets.

I went to one of the services and started through the listing process. When I hit the pricing page, I found out, through their "help" widget, just where the money was going. On a $74 face ticket, here's the distribution I might see:

Face:	74.00	74.00
Price:	102.35	209.19
Buyer Sees:	125.00	250.00
Payout:	92.11	188.27
Buyer's Fee:	22.65 22.1%	40.81 19.5%
My Fee:	10.24 10.0%	20.92 4.8%
Total Fees:	32.89 32.1%	61.73 29.5%

Damn! Nice work if you can get it! Here's a service that holds no inventory, has very little labor costs, and provides, what? From one side, a valuable service: providing a marketplace that allows buyer and seller to come together safely and efficiently. On the other side, a service that facilitates that which we used to consider both illegal and amoral: ticket scalping.

I always knew I was in the wrong business.