“I do things honestly,” the scalper was saying. “Not like this.”
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“I do it fairly,” contended the scalper, who calls himself Mike. To him “fairly” means hiring helpers but depending on their sheer numbers and the luck of the draw to score some tickets. “I just bring a lot of people. I ask my friends too–anyone I can get,” Mike said.
From Mike’s perspective the bad guy in the ticket-selling business isn’t Ticketmaster or the scalpers but the promoter, Jam Productions. “They hold back 75 percent of the good seats,” he contended. “It’s all politics. They’re for the people who know someone from Jam or the owners [of the venue].” The Bruce Springsteen sale that day was a perfect example, he said. “They went to the balcony [i.e., sold the available floor seats] in six or seven minutes and then took half an hour to sell out.” He said the scalpers, or brokers, “are fighting over nothing. They’re fighting over the crumbs. If they didn’t hold back seats, there would be enough for everybody.”
Mike took issue with my column about the wristband sale of Grateful Dead tickets at the Merchandise Mart Carson Pirie Scott early last August. He said that my story implied that Carson’s personnel were in on the scam and that that’s not true. “They’re clean,” he said. (For the record, my story didn’t imply that the Carson’s employees were in on anything, just that they let scalpers abuse prominently posted rules.)
