More on the Marquee-Hoodlums ticket-fee war

The Republic and the New Times are catching up on the stand Tempe’s Hoodlums record store has taken against Lucky Man Productions, which operates the Marquee rock club. The store, which collected a reasonable $1 for each ticket it sold for Marquee shows, balked when Lucky Man tried to add on an additional $3.

The store’s blistering original statement post here. PHXated’s December story on it here.

The Republic story is here, with a consistent statement from Hoodlum’s co-owner Steve Wiley:

Wiley […] stresses he’s not on an anti-Marquee crusade.

“It’s not a personal thing,” he says. “We’ve had a great relationship with those guys at the Marquee for many years. I’m not against service fees. We charge a one-dollar service fee for carrying the tickets at our store, and everyone is fine with that. But if the Marquee or whoever needs to charge $28 in order to make ends meet, then I’m a businessperson, I don’t have a problem with that. Just make it $28 dollars. But don’t put $25 on the tickets and the Web site and then expect me to collect an extra $3 for you.”

New Times blog post on the issue by Martin Cizmar is here. Besides being late and misinformed, it’s about a tenth as good as the Republic story, which is a little embarrassing.

PHXated’s previous posts on the outlandish ticket fees charged by the Marquee are here.

PHXations—Saturday, January 30

For an appearance by Anvil, the heavy metal band, at the Marquee Tuesday, the club will screen the documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil before the show. Details here.

Hard to recommend the show, however—it’s another one of those Marquee service-fee-ripoff specials where a $19 advertised ticket magicks its way up to $27.75 after three separate exorbitant service fees—a 46 percent tariff.

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Matthew Moore has an installation at Sundance. It’s set in a Park City grocery store, and consists of time-lapse films of vegetables growing—with free food besides. Details from the festival here.

Moore is a sculptor, filmmaker and I guess you’d call it conceptual artist, who uses his farm west of Phoenix, now in its fourth generation of family ownership, as a fulcrum for his interests.

PHXated liked this Moore apercu: “Instead of pointing fingers I started pointing thumbs, and start to dissect how we distribute food.” His website is here.

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Ticketmaster-by-the-Lake, continued

A few days ago, Hoodlums, the Tempe record store, announced it wouldn’t sell folks tickets to the upcoming Phoenix show at the Marquee. (That’s Phoenix the French rock band.) The store was protesting a new $3 fee added by the promoter, Lucky Man.

Details here.

This a.m. PHXated, considering going to the show, took a whack at buying tickets online. $25, the stated price, seemed fair.

But the following is what I ended up with:

Lucky Man added, for no reason I could see, a $6.50 “service fee” per ticket.

Then wanted to charge me $2.50 for printing out the tickets myself—that’s the “delivery fee.”

… And then charged me another $3 under the rubrick “order fee.”

The total, $34.25 per ticket, is a nearly 40 percent markup—for a show at the promoter’s own venue, using the promoter’s own online ticketing system.

Ticketmaster-by-the-lake: Hoodlums refuses to sell Marquee tix with excessive service fees

Hoodlums, the Tempe Record store, has posted a blistering letter on Facebook. It says that the Marquee, the rock club just north of Tempe Town Lake on Mill, has added a new $3 ticket fee onto tickets the store sells to Marquee shows.

According to the store, they’ve done business with the club and its management, Lucky Man Productions, in the past the same way they do business with other promoters: They get tix to shows and sell them to customers, adding on a $1 service fee.

The store says it won’t sell tickets with an added $3 fee. PHXated is a student of Ticketmaster’s remarkable and reprehensible business model; we consider Hoodlums’ statement of the issues involved trenchantly put:

We add on our dollar, and everyone is happy. No deception. No service charge for anything other than actual service.

Then we get our Phoenix tickets [i.e., the band Phoenix, which has an upcoming show at the Marquee], and we are being asked to start collecting three bucks above the advertised ticket price? Like we said: We don’t do that. We charge ticket price plus a buck, not ticket price plus four bucks. That’s not a fair price. Besides, why would we collect an extra service fee for someone else’s service, especially when that “someone else” hasn’t provided ANY extra service[?]

If the venue wants to charge extra for their service, that’s their prerogative to negotiate the higher ticket price. If the venue wants to charge extra at its own box office, so be it. If the promoter, or the artist, or management, or anyone involved in the negotiations needs to charge $28 for the tickets in order to make ends meet, we aren’t in a position to debate that either. While it is our sincere belief that concerts in general need to be cheaper in order for the concert industry to thrive again, setting the ticket price is none of our business. You need to make an extra three bucks? Make it a $28 ticket. Don’t make it a $25 ticket and ask us to collect $28.

The Herberger learns a thing or two (or 13) from Ticketmaster

PHXated was interested in going to the AriZoni Theater awards at the Herberger next week, so we started poking around to try to get tickets.

The tickets—billed as $21 here—seemed reasonable. But we also noted an asterisk and the note: “Additional fees may apply.”

We smelled a rat immediately.

The page that purported to tell us how much tickets were. Why couldn’t it just tell us the full price, if it “might” not be the amount it was telling us here?

We had to make about a half-dozen more clicks, over the course of which we were told again the tickets were $21, before getting the real story:

In other words, the theater was adding on $13—a 30-plus-percent surcharge per ticket—for the privilege of buying a ticket.

Isn’t this low rent? Ticketmaster does this all the time, of course—but that’s because Ticketmaster is one of the scummiest companies in America. What’s the Herberger’s excuse? Why can’t it just name a price for its tickets up front and dispense with the cheesy last-minute mysterious “fees”?

Update: On an AriZoni Awards page, it, too, bills the tickets as costing $21—with an asterisk.

Down at the bottom of the page we read:

(*not including additional facility fees charged by the Herberger)

The issue here isn’t the price. It’s the anti-consumer, corporate-doings-in-the-background mentality. You don’t pay a hidden, only-revealed-at-the-last-minute “checkout fee” when you go to Basha’s. The AriZoni Awards and the Herberger should just work out their deal, set a price, and publicize it.

Note how the New Times cites the 30-percent-lower price. The paper got that figure from the awards, even though the producers knew the actual price to its audience was 30 percent higher.

(The Republic? Ah, well, the Republic doesn’t seem to be aware of the show.)