On Monday morning at 10 AM CT, the Chicago Cubs began giving their loyal fans a chance to start buying tickets to regular season games early, but there is a catch. It’s the Inaugural Mastercard First-Chance Presale of seats for the 2010 season, giving fans a chance to buy tickets before they officially go on sale on Friday.
The catch is that the tickets are marked up 20 percent. So while you can wait until Friday to pay $54 for a bleacher seat to see a game at Wrigley Field against the hated St. Louis Cardinals, they may already be gone if you don’t take advantage of your opportunity to pay $64.80 for that same ticket on Monday morning.
Though if you use a Mastercard to buy that ticket, it’ll only cost you $61.56 thanks to that 5 percent discount after the 20 percent markup!
As you’d imagine, this promotion is getting some reaction from Cubs fans in Chicago that isn’t exactly positive. It’s seen as if the Cubs are scalping their own fans tickets, which, in essence, they are. Still, this isn’t exactly anything new, and though they may be going about it in different ways, the Cubs aren’t even the only team in Chicago to do this.
Tickets for White Sox games went on sale this past Friday, though Sox fans who were members of the Sox Pride Fan Club could begin purchasing tickets as early as last Wednesday. Now, the tickets they bought early were at face value, but that price didn’t include the membership fee to join the club, which can run you anywhere from $24.95 to $134.95 a year.
What exactly is the difference?
The fact of the matter is that baseball tickets, much like everything else in the United States, follow the laws of supply and demand. There is a demand for Cubs tickets that far outweighs the supply, so therefore, the price is going to go up. So while fans may complain about the 20 percent premium on the Cubs presale, it’s probably not stopping them from logging on to the team’s Web site this morning to buy them.
2/15/2010 11:31 AM ET By Tom Fornelli
