Looking at ticket resellers at American and their financially destructive decisions
Staff Writer
During FLEX, students Gabriel Hwang (12) and Parsh Gandhi (12) were part of a group that purchased tickets that would soon depreciate to a Travis Scott concert both for their own use and to resell. Many student concertgoers are unaware of the risks that ticket resellers face but are affected by their actions nonetheless.
Hwang, one student who attempted to resell tickets for Travis Scott’s show on October 31, said, “Wow, people are making a lot of money from the Drake concert. Maybe I should sell.” Hwang said that he and his friends decided, “Let’s buy five tickets for ourselves and then we’ll buy three extra tickets to resell later. We bought them with Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster has a resale feature. Ticketmaster gets a slice of the pie.”
Gandhi, another member of the purchasing party, said, “So there’s a queue on Ticketmaster, and you try to be the first one there. So you try to get in at the earliest stop possible.”
What was the outcome of the ticket selling? “They didn’t sell. So basically what happened was five days later he released the November 1 show time. So that lowered all the ticket prices because there’s more supply and less demand,” said Hwang. “We can’t refund them and we can’t sell them for a profit. We’re still trying to resell them, hoping that the demand will go up because obviously the closer you get to the concert, the more people will buy it.”
On the current state of their purchases, Gandhi said, “Obviously our tickets went to a lower price than they were originally. You can set the price based on other people selling. But if you jack it up too much, you might not be able to sell.”
Issac Hernandez (11), an avid concertgoer, explained his affinity for the mainstream concerts that ticket resellers often target. “Generally speaking they’re gonna have a better sound system, better seats, and everything.” When asked about the effect of ticket resellers on his experiences, Hernandez said, “There have been a couple concerts that are too expensive and sometimes not in our price range. I feel like maybe they should make a cap. Tickets can go from 400 to 3000, you know, that’s a crazy increase. It’s annoying, but honestly people are just doing what they got to do to make money.”
Junior Matteo Brillo, who enjoys smaller concert venues, said, “If I went to a reseller, I’d pay twice as much. I go straight from the original. I don’t have a problem with it. It’s not cool, but I can see why you would want to do it.”
After the experience, Hwang said, “I think I got to bite the bullet. It’s like you lose 1,000 in Vegas, do you put another 1,000 into the slot machine? I don’t think so. You just cut your losses and leave. I wish this could be some great success story, but there’s no such thing as free money.”
Gandhi addressed any future concert plans. “I might do it again for some other concert that I would want to go to, but I wouldn’t try to do it just for the money.”
Hwang, who experienced the effects of ticket reselling before becoming a reseller, said, “I wasn’t a seller then, I was a buyer. With the Drake concert other people were jacking up the price. I had to pay way above what the listed price was. I have no reservations. I feel like I was screwed by the world so I can screw the world by jacking up the price.”
Caption: Laughing through the pain of multiple net-negative purchases totalling over a thousand dollars in lost value, Gabriel Hwang (12) and Parsh Gandhi (12) check the status of their unsold tickets. “I spent 2.5k on tickets, $1,200 in losses. Travis Scott, little scammer boy, he removed the refund option,” said Hwang. (PC: Daniel Davis (11)).
Eagle Era 
Leave a comment