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I no longer get excited when I hear about a big, popular event coming to town. Instead, I get a feeling of intense dread and apprehension, as I gear myself up to enter the Thunderdome that is the race for tickets.
Can I afford one? Will I be able to book a room that isn’t just a pull-out couch in somebody’s basement? Where did we land on that whole “pandemic” thing?
I experienced that familiar feeling a few days ago when Oasis announced their reunion tour. I had a Minority Report-style vision of my own grisly future, battling it out with my fellow Mancunians as we desperately vied for our own slice of sweet Nineties Britpop nostalgia.
It turns out my anxieties were extremely prescient. Not long after tickets went on sale Saturday morning, on websites like ticketmaster.co.uk, gigsandtours.com, and seetickets.com, customers started reporting crashes, endless queues, and scalpers reselling seats at hugely inflated markups (some are reporting prices as high as £6,000, and no, that third zero is not a typo).
It got so bad that “#shambles”, started trending on Twitter/X, as people took to the social media site to voice their displeasure. Sure, it’s hard to know which specific shambles the hashtag could be referring to at any given time, but I’m pretty confident it was this one.
People are pretty mad at Ticketmaster et al, but in the companies’ defence, how could they possibly have known that people would want to use their websites for the services they offer? What are they, psychic?
Believe it or not, “doing things” didn’t use to be such an ordeal. People would frequently do things – go to concerts, see movies, take a trip away – without feeling unimaginable frustration every single step of the way. That all went the way of Blockbuster and E numbers, though, and now every big event seems to be an exercise in wildly expensive incompetence.
Even in some hypothetical world where procuring tickets was a simple process, the cheapest seats in most places start at more than £70. In the band’s (and my) home city of Manchester, they’re almost £150! Imagine spending £150 – at a minimum – and then realising after all that that you have to go to Manchester for your troubles. Will the humiliations never cease?
What’s really sad is that we’ve become so used to being exploited – both for our money and our time – that this really just feels like any other day. Believe it or not, there was a time when people actually expected companies to provide the service that they advertised, and if they didn’t a better company would come along and do it instead. Now though, mediocrity is the norm.
You have to pay through the nose for a substandard service, and if you decide to take your money elsewhere, good luck! Because they’re all like that (assuming an alternative even exists). And if you have any complaints? Have fun talking to an AI that feels like it was designed by a second, somehow even less sophisticated AI.
It’s not even just tickets. Takeaway didn’t show up? Nine times out of 10 that money’s gone forever, and if you do manage to claim it back you might receive it in the form of credit for an app that just robbed you. Want to talk to a doctor? Enjoy spending three hours in my phone labyrinth, mortal, before deciding it’s probably easier to just take your chances with the rash.
A lot of people are going to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime concert because of things that would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. Don’t worry though, I’m sure they’ll definitely get tickets next time. Maybe.
Luckily for me, I’m from Manchester, so I’ll probably listen to Oasis the way I did in the 2000s – from the garden of a friend who lives near the venue, beer in hand, as we both thank our lucky stars that we didn’t pay six grand to hear “Wonderwall” for the millionth time.
