Scalped Again!
While events there didn’t lead them to believe that the store employees were in on the scam–as the Tower customers had–Blockbuster customers too protested after it became clear that a band of scalpers had succeeded in stacking their operatives at the front of the line for tickets.
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Complaints went nowhere. “I said to [the person who seemed to be in charge], ‘Hey look, some sort of a scam is being run here,’” says Schwartz. “He just blew me off.”
Hitsville salutes the three newest members of the Chicago rock scene, babies born to WXRT’s Norm Winer and Wendy Rice (Rebecca Lynne, November 3, their third), Metro’s Joe Shanahan and his wife Jenny (Tara Ellen, November 14, their first), and Lounge Ax’s Sue Miller and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy (Spencer, December 16, their first)…. Tribune reporters Ray Gibson and Mark Caro crafted a penetrating look at the scalping industry a few years back. The three-part series, which ran in 1992 from July 19 to 21, can be found in the Tribune archives on America Online. Do a search for stories with the word “scalping” in the year 1992…. The south side’s R. Kelly sold a quarter of a million copies of his new record and debuted at number one on the Billboard charts a few weeks back, the second Chicago artist to do so in a four-week period. The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness has been in the top ten for seven weeks; it has just passed the million mark and continues to sell in the neighborhood of 100,000 albums a week.
