For the Good of the Game
The moral outrage in New Zealand against ticket scalping is hard to fathom. Upon what ethical principles might it rest?
A chap goes into a local dairy and buys a pack of Rothmans. He goes home, puts it on Trade Me and sells the pack to someone in Whanganui for twice what he paid (where cigarettes have been totally banned due to a local member's Bill sponsored by Tariana Turia). In the world of commerce its called arbitrage. Everyone claps the chap on the back and calls him smart, insightful, and enterprising. The same chap lines up to buy a ticket to a rugby test match, goes home, sells it on Trade Me for ten times the price, and he is called a scab, a thief, and an animal. Right? Right!
So, what gives?
Yes, we know that rugby is the religion of a demi-god in New Zealand and that a test match is the equivalent of a temple paean to the goddess. But that's all just hogwash, so reasoning along those lines is expeditiously flushed down the proverbial. All quasi-religious arguments against ticket arbitraging implying that the goddess is dishonoured are bunkum, so let's get on with it.
Well, then. What about the purchaser of the overpriced arbitraged tickets being ripped off. What about that, eh? That's what scalping refers to, after all. The stupid guy or gal who bought the overpriced tickets has been well and truly ripped off because they could have got them for much less if they had lined up months ago. May we note, however, that the buyer was a willing buyer and value, like beauty, is in the beholder's eyes. If he purchased willingly then the choice was his, the gain was his, and presumably the pay off from attending the game was worth it. If not, he made a bad investment--but that's life. It was his free choice.
And consider the seller. Imagine he has just concluded his trade and notices another guy selling a ticket. He sees that he has managed to sell his for twice what he was just able to get. Does he run after the chap to which he sold his ticket and say, "Hey mate. You underpaid me. The price has just gone up double. Fork over more." Nah. A trade is a trade. It's a contract. It would be theft to make additional demands. Maybe someone should remind the Rugby Union of that.
How about the argument, It's against the spirit of the game. Spare us. We thought the game was about a contest, a winner take all affair. If the Rugby Union underpriced the tickets to begin with and someone else in the great game of competitive commerce made a profit off the Union's mispricing, it's winner take all, right? That's the spirit of the game we understood. Correct us if we are wrong, but we didn't see the old AB's offering to share the Webb Ellis Rugby World Cup trophy with the French.
We have never heard an argument against ticket arbitraging that made any ethical sense in the slightest. To the contrary, all such arguments display an assault upon other people's property rights. They imply that the seller (the Rugby Union, in this case) still retains a property right in what it has sold.
We suspect that the real reason the Rugby Union and others get into high moral dudgeon against ticket scalping is their belief they have underpriced their tickets to begin with "for the good of the game". There are all those faithful, loyal rugby unions that need to have access to the big games as a reward. Heartland rugby and all that sort of stuff. Nah. There's a better way. Charge the estimated market price for the tickets to begin with and doll out cash to the local unions so they can afford them if you feel so obligated. Maybe hold back a few thousand tickets and flick them off on Trade Me yourselves just 48 hours before the match. Or stand outside the ground just hours before and enjoy the arbitrage trade. Ethically you will be on far stronger ground.
Years ago we were working for a high street bank. To it's credit, the bank gave each of the staff a miniature MP3 player as a Christmas gift--emblazoned with the company logo of course. Some enterprising staff members sold theirs on Trade Me over Christmas. The CEO got to hear of it and went all sniffy via an e-mail to all staff telling them to return the gift if it was so worthless to them.
Here was a CEO of a major bank who demonstrated in that telling instant that the Chief Executive neither understood commerce, nor property rights. We always thought the entrepreneurial bank staff members should be congratulated--after all, was not the MP3 player their property? They were parlaying what was of little value into cash so they could apply the gift to something that was of more value to them. Good on them. They were treating the gift with due respect. Apparently not--at least in the mind of the CEO who seemed to believe the bank still had some vestigial property rights in the gift. It was a gift with strings. Ironically, making that clear to the bank staff in one sniffy e-mail, instantly devalued the company's generosity.
1 comment:
There are two main arguments against scalping that make some kind of sense to me. I think that sense is primarily emotional, but it's the emotional arguments that often arouse the most passion and are hardest to defeat.
The first is that scalping adds no value to the ticket. This is undeniably true. The scalped ticket has not changed in any way by being handled by the scalper. (The same could be argued for many retailers — except that typically the wholesalers from which they source their goods refuse to deal directly with the public!) As you point out, however, this argument loses its potency when it's pointed out that no-one is forcing any putative buyer to pay more for the ticket than he thinks it's worth. Thus, it's not so much that the scalper is artificially inflating the price, as that the ticketing agency was undervaluing the tickets. If, in fact, the scalper even succeeds in selling his tickets for more than what he paid for them.
The second argument, I think, actually stems from New Zealanders' egalitarianism. It's that by buying cheap and selling dear, the scalpers are denying "the poor" the opportunity to attend the game, or concert, or whatever it is. They may have only had the chance of a lottery anyway, goes the thinking, but scalping deprives them of even the lottery. If you're familiar with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, scalping, goes the argument, ruins the chances of Charlie Bucket in order to benefit Veruca Salt.
However true that may be, passing laws to prevent scalping would almost certainly be a waste of time. Writing it in such a way as to avoid preventing "legitimate" on-selling of tickets would be a nightmare, and enforcement all but impossible except at ruinous expense. Methinks ticketing agencies would be better off seeking market-based solutions, such as for example offering 10% of the tickets for auction each week for ten weeks, thereby competing against scalpers on their own ground.
Post a Comment