Predictable

Ralph Vacchiano got some feedback from some fans about the PSL progress. Add a little Hanlon and you have a NY Daily News blog post.

The “final stage” of PSL sales? The final stages of greed. The Giants have to peddle this schtick dreck Mezz A- Mezz B- Coach’s Club garbage ripoff to their waitlist people so that they can finally market it to the corporates who pay the same stupidity for Knicks and Nets front row seats. They sent me an email and I never heard from them AGAIN. I am a waste of their time, obviously! I was on their waitlist for 10 browning years, one of their diehards. But they are smart enough to know one thing- let the waitlist people show their interest but do not use your salesforce on these people because the economy browns and almost none of these people are stupid enough to want these dreck seats. Maybe we can sucker some of the newbie-never-been-theres to bite on the Field 3 cheapo 5K end zone seats. But we need to plow through these waitlist terds so that we can say we gave you your chance and then move on to the Manhattan skyscrapers and NJ Pharmas.

“Limited Number.” Were we born YESTERDAY? Maybe the day before yesterday, but not yesterday.

“We had a very good response from our ticket holders,” said Giants VP of communications Pat Hanlon. “We anticipated being able to make a limited number available to the wait list. In fact, the response from the ticket holders was so good, we have less to offer the wait list than we had projected at the start.” What Hanlon won’t tell you is how many of the seat holders had to trade “down” to the cheaper seats, going “up”stairs to the “loge” and the “terrace” seats. Do the math- they are going through the waitlist people like a hot knife through butter and they have 9,300 Club Seats, so that means that there are many thousands of fans displaced up and out of the way to make room for the corporates. Hanlon may be factual about having less seats to offer the waitlist people, but given the complete lack of attention they paid to the waitlist people, they realized quickly they mispriced the club seats for their existing ticket holders. Remember, the club seats are the prime locations, and they have been passed up. Every day we watch the stock market go lower, we know that cash is king and $700 for a single game means $7K PER YEAR PER SEAT, not to mention the $20K love kiss. (Oh, you forgot the fact that as a season’s ticket holder you have to pay the preseason hidden ‘tax’ of buying that useless set of two preseason games?!)

Believe it or not, you cannot “argue” with what the Giants are doing. They are merely extracting as much value as they can from their stadium, a stadium they built and paid for. None of us may like it, but they can charge multiples (150K?!) of what they are charging if someone will be stupid enough to pay for it (see Jerry Jones). Caveat emptor. The rest of us are smart enough to realize that this is how you alienate your loyal customers- the ones who ultimately pay the bills. This is the road that baseball went down. Look where the dilution and the hijacking of the dollar got them. This will take many years, more likely decade/s, but when it is done the path the Giants owners took will be looked back on as a turning point in the decisions they had to make, one after the other, all leading down a rode of abandonment of the unwritten contract between business owner and people like us.. their fans, their paying customers. Steve Tisch heard the boo birds from the fans when he was called out at halftime. 10 years from now he won’t hear ANYTHING from the corporate empty seats and then he will have much larger problems.