Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowboy89
^ I'm totally cool with a free market. Pure scalping is fine with me. The issue most people probably have is the market manipulation tactics used by promoters in conjunction with scalping websites.
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I'm cool with a free market that doesn't have unnecessary middlemen in it. Who, exactly, benefits from scalping? Is it the end consumer? Is it the promoter of the event? Is it the artist/troupe/player's company/etc giving the performance? No, it's someone who has inserted themselves into the process for no purpose other than to extract value while adding no value of their own.
With online ordering of tickets, there isn't even the excuse of convenience anymore - at least in the old days, someone had to stand in line for hours to get tickets to scalp, so if you didn't want to do that, someone would sell you tickets at a mark-up and those tickets actually had added value. Now they use bots and spend no time at all getting the tickets, yet still expect people to be ok with their manipulation of the market to their own unjustified advantage.
Anyone scalping as a means of income is a leeching d-bag; if you sell the occasional ticket to a hockey game because you can't go, or buy 4 tickets to a concert and sell two every now and then, then you aren't doing much wrong. However, if you think it's ok to buy up blocks of tickets to events you have no intention of attending and then re-sell them, you are a useless drag on society adding nothing of value to it whatsoever, and anything that is done to cut down on this practice is IMO justified as long as it doesn't particularly inconvenience the legit consumer.