CrusaderPi wrote on Thu, 15 December 2022 10:17

tardigrade81 wrote on Thu, 15 December 2022 10:07 Mike wrote on Thu, 15 December 2022 16:35 CrusaderPi wrote on Thu, 15 December 2022 11:37 NetBOG wrote on Thu, 15 December 2022 08:28 CrusaderPi wrote on Thu, 15 December 2022 08:16 Plenty of seats still available! Ya, ticetmaster showing some sections are still only half sold. and the team is being jerks about people buying and re-selling. The Oilers can't sell their inventory as it is. Customers become competition very quickly. So the sell out streak is over? You know you've screwed up pretty bad as an organization when you can't sell out your building in a hockey mad city like Edmonton with one of the best players in the history of the game in his prime with another guy who will go down as one of the best Europeans ever riding shotgun. Meh Seems everything since covid has changed. Hard to sell out any games. Whether that’s NFL, NBA, baseball. Anything. Covid is nothing more than an excuse. These problems were evident as soon as the initial buzz of the new arena wore off. Covid does not factor into the cost value equation.

I think it has to do with a lot of factors:

- the team still isn't great even with superstars on it
- the economy of Alberta has struggled for several years, and even though it's a little better now, there's less extra cash for a lot of folks than there once was
- the team has scraped every cent it can out of people. The tickets are among the league's most expensive and the food and drink costs are ridiculous now. People can't afford to go to as many games as they used to, because the team has extracted every penny at every step of the way.

Even the 50/50 isn't the draw it once was, because A) again, it is way more expensive and B) you don't need to be in the building to play, and you don't even find out the winner while you're there.

The Oilers haven't done much to increase the value of their offering, while the shiny newness of the building and even the superstars has waned a little. So people save up for the playoff tickets, and reduce the number of times they're in the building along the way.

As for why they are now cracking down on the re-sellers? That's simple. They sell walk-up tickets (now on a variable scale, rather than fixed prices) and if someone buys at season ticket prices, they can sell at a profit below what walk-up price would be. When there's tremendous demand, then it doesn't matter to the Oilers. They don't have much inventory to sell anyhow.

But now there's less season ticket holders and more seats for them to sell, and if they get undercut by their own season ticket holders, then they end up holding the bag on more unsold tickets. And happily for them, the move to the Ticket Manager app makes it really easy to tell. If you sell your tickets to a different random person every game and never keep the tickets yourself, and the seats aren't going to people with similar company email or similar last name or anything? They can figure that out much easier than when it was that greasy-haired guy selling the physical tickets outside Rexall Place while nearby some guy hammered away on PVC pails with a couple drumsticks.

With that in mind, it makes sense for them to go after the re-sellers. And you know what? I don't give a damn about scalpers losing their tickets. Those people drive the price up in the times when things are good, so if they get slapped down? I'm all for it. I just wish it wasn't simply the Oilers being only focused on the bottom line that led to that, rather than concerned about actual fan experience.

"Thinking that a bad team's best players are the reason the team is bad is the "Tambellini re-signing Lennart Petrell" of sports opinions." @Woodguy55
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