Ticketmaster is a dick

The Foo Fighters are playing in Toronto in August, and a few friends and I want to go. Tickets don’t officially go on sale until tomorrow, but there are a few presale promotions available, and I figured I’d take advantage of that to beat the rush. So I go to the Ticketmaster website and look for tickets, find what I’m looking for and go to the checkout area of the site. The particular tickets I selected are $22.50. However, there is also a “facility surcharge” of $3.75, which I assume is implemented by the Molson Amphitheatre (the venue of the concert). Also, Ticketmaster slaps on their $9.00 “convenience charge” which sucks, considering it is almost half the cost of the ticket.

Furthermore, Ticketmaster has an option where they email you your tickets and you print them out yourself. For this “TicketFast” option, they charge you an extra $2.50. Emailing the tickets is an automated process, and doesn’t require any human intervention, plus you print out the tickets yourself… The only reason Ticketmaster would charge you for this is to make even more money than they are already making on each sale. If I instead chose to pick up tickets at my local Ticketmaster outlet, I wouldn’t have to pay any additional charge, even though an employee would have to wait on me and print out my ticket. If I chose to have the tickets mailed to me, it would cost nothing extra, despite the fact that they would have to print off a ticket and pay mailing costs. I guess they charge me $2.50 for the convenience of printing out my own ticket. Bastards.

I’m definitely not the only one to dislike Ticketmaster. A quick Google search proves this. I seem to recall Pearl Jam trying to go on tour without Ticketmaster’s help a few years back, but I’m not sure how well that worked out for them. Ticketmaster has a monopoly on the event ticket industry, and I for one think it is horrible. The bottom line is that Ticketmaster sucks hard.