Mariner ticket prices steady, more at the same time
I realized I hadn’t touched on this yet. The 2009 season seat prices didn’t go up at all, and they’re not charging extra for premium games, which means for a full season a seat is $21 less for the year.
Ah! But for the rest of you, this year there are 17 (seventeen!) premium games, at $5 per seat per game. That’s up from seven last year at $3 extra each. And ten “value” games which are $5 off per stub (which makes center field bleacher seats $3 each day of game? Really?), which makes it seem kind of like they’re keeping the net premium games steady, but when you think about it, not really.
I’m torn about demand-based pricing like this. For one, the M’s aren’t really promising a good game. No one who attended a game last year they paid $3 more for got anything back when the team stunk up the place. That’s the pretext they’re choosing, though: that you’re getting a higher-quality product. If you paid for a nice new Lexus though and got half of a Fiero, you’d rightfully be pretty ticked off.
And yet I understand that the team wants to make more money, and the control a limited supply of tickets for each game, and the demand is sometimes far greater than other games. Why should the scalpers make money instead of the team?
But the M’s can’t hold a Dutch auction before the season for each game, and they can’t cut prices below what they sold them for (well, not openly, but that’s a different story). They could increase day-of-game prices up and up based on demand if the team’s in contention, but that’d be confusing and potentially anger a lot of fans.
So this is what we get: the premium games are a tax on New York and Boston fans, more or less. They’re not going to buy season tickets or 16-game plans, but they’ll pack the house for their teams and premium prices seem like bargains compared to how they’ll get shaken down if they attend their team’s home game. They’re a dependable supply of affluent, price-insensitive customers, and the M’s are soaking them a little more every season. There are worse ways to make a buck.
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Taxing Yankees and Red Sox fans is something I think everyone should support whole heartedly.
From reading this it sounds like Yankees and Red Sox fans may be subsidizing Royals fans (or whomever the value package turns out to be). Perhaps its just a microcosm of the MLB luxury tax structure.
which makes center field bleacher seats $3 each day of game? Really?
No. From the team’s seating and pricing chart, value games are $5 off “except center field bleachers.”
That’s not how pricing works, though. X being more expensive than Y does not entail that X is better than Y. In many cases, X is more expensive simply because X is in demand and Y is not. When SUVs were popular, car companies could charge more for them and make big profits. Now that they are less popular, they need to cut the price to get rid of them. Is it because the SUV itself has changed? No, but it’s less in demand.
The tiered pricing makes perfect sense to me. The way to maximize your profits is, as much as possible, to charge the highest amount that customers are willing to pay, and to target different groups with different prices (it’s been a while since I took economics, so I don’t remember what that’s called). People are willing to pay more for Yankees-Mariners than Royals-Mariners. It’s not unjust, it’s basic economics, and I’m surprised baseball teams haven’t been doing this for a long time.
Ticket sales were down, what, about 12% last year? They’ve fallen over 1M per year from peak sales. The “premium” games (as Derek points out, premium in price, not in quality) have, for the most part, not been selling out.
What the Mariners seem to be doing is flouting the laws of supply and demand. Film distributors have been doing this for years; ticket demand has fallen almost every year for decades, but revenues hold fairly steady on increasing prices. Meanwhile, film makers now usually realize no profit until their product goes to DVD and/or television.
So the Mariners may think they will take in more revenue from the visiting team’s fan base (much as Seattle/King County soaks visitors with its rental car and hotel taxes); and the “premium” delta may goad season ticket sales a bit. But long-term, it will predictably depress total attendance across baseball (as more teams adopt the strategy) and will drive more (of a declining fan base) to broadcast viewing.
To raise prices on a product of dubious quality and diminishing sales is an act of hubris that only a government-subsidized institution (or a monopoly) could afford. Short-sighted and stupid, it reinforces the view that Armstrong and Lincoln need to find another line of work.
From reading this it sounds like Yankees and Red Sox fans may be subsidizing Royals fans (or whomever the value package turns out to be).
In reality, the value package is not so much about any team’s fans as it is pumping up attendance for weeknight games before school lets out. You can even catch the Rays and Angels in it (although before this year, the Rays would have been a candidate for discounting based on interest in the opponent).
What surprises me, though, is to see Arizona and Cleveland in the premium games. I suppose Arizona’s plausible as an interleague weekend series, plus they’re close enough for snowbird interest. But Cleveland? I wonder what Ichiro would have to say about that.
I think they might be counting on RJ pitching one of the Arizona games (assuming he resigns), and hoping that he’s going for his 300th win.
I’m not arguing that higher prices means higher quality. My point, and I tried to make this clear, is that the M’s are packaging and selling this whole deal as if those games are better than others and thus demand a higher cost.
Though I guess if you’re into the dictionary argumentation, you could say they’re using premium as a noun.
I agree with Dave – We couldn’t tax them enough to make up for how obnoxious Red Sox and Yankee nation are at the SAFE
Do the premium tickets include watching Holliday in an As uniform?
Do the premium tickets include watching Holliday in an As uniform?
Wow, I’m kinda suprised. The A’s? Huh.
I’m all in favor of taxing Red Sox and F’ing Yankees fans for tickets, too, Dave. However, let us consider some economics.
As DMZ rightly notes, Red Sox and Yankees fans are relatively price-insensitive. The same is not true of Mariner fans, who are much more likely to go see the M’s some night when they don’t have to worry about the stupid price upgrade.
This lets more Sox or Yankees fans in the door at the expense of Mariner fans. (The effect is even more pronounced as the stadium gets closer to capacity.)
Essentially, the Mariners are pricing themselves out of home games. Safeco Field turns into a friendly environment for the visitors. I used to hate this when I was a season ticket holder (’01 and ’02), and having the team encourage this behavior is unsavory.
So, the ‘premium’ prices are only for single games? That seems to make sense.
Well, in a perfect world the tickets would have a base price that is then adjusted according to the winning percentage of the team. By the end of last season, the bleacher tickets would’ve been close to free.
Do the premium tickets include watching Holliday in an As uniform?
I assume that will get its own post if it actually goes through and we know who was on the other side of the trade. (Is Beane counting his 2012 stadium revenues before the thing is built? Or is he planning to let Holliday walk at the end of ’09 for the draft picks?)
I think they should just come out with an out-an-out tax on visiting fans that works like this: If you show up in opposing team apparel or are seen/heard actively rooting for the opposition an usher can check your stub to verify you have a visitor-fan ticket and paid the appropriate 15-20% markup. If you haven’t- out you go.
This way, if you show up and watch the game like a civilized human being you never get hassled, even if you are rooting for the other side. But if you’re going to be obnoxiously anti-Mariner you pay more or get the boot. I call it the “Screw Jerk Red Sox Fans” fee.
I’m pretty sure that the Mariners (like most sports francises) do not believe that price is the primary determinant of attendance, at least at the scales we’re talking about. Would more people attend if price dropped? Yes, but probably not enough more to make up for the loss. You could drop prices a lot, but that would be counterproductive.
I guess what I’m saying is that they probably know what they are doing from the business side of things. The baseball side, perhaps not so much.
I think varying prices makes a lot of sense. I don’t see it as claiming that the premium games are better that others, they’re saying that they think the ticket demand will be higher than for some other games, so they can get more money for them. Similarly, they discount the value games because Kansas City on a Monday night in April is a hard sell.
It is exactly what the scalpers in the street, on the web, and sometimes even on craigslist do – sell ’em for what they are worth. By the team doing it, they take a least a few of those dollars away from those entrepreneurs.
Sure, the money might just go to the team owners’ pockets. Yeah, we’re all paying for Safeco Field in taxes and some families can’t afford to go to games like they should. And yes, I may be assuming a near-perfect market when I say the dollars are primarily coming out of ticket resellers pockets. But if you owned a three-bedroom house in Bellevue, would you be willing to sell it for the same, somewhat arbitrary price as every other three-bedroom in Bellevue?
Free markets and capitalism – what a country!
“Price discrimination”. It’s definitely a mixed bag, in terms of being positive vs negative for fans.
Many of the pros and cons have already been mentioned, I’ll just add a couple more. To the extent that the one-size-fits-all pricing is inefficient (e.g. due to excess demand for some games, but with fewer Mariner sellouts that is less of an issue now), variable pricing raises efficiency and is a good thing. But to the extent that it’s not variable pricing and instead is price discrimination, that’s usually bad for fans overall (although, as others have pointed out, much of this cost might be borne by Yankee and Red Sox fans). More generally, consumers should get nervous when a monopolist finds new ways to jack up prices and increase its profit. Although there’s still a silver lining, if the opportunity for increased profits helps or encourages the team to spend money to put a winning team on the field.
While I’m going to pay more for the games I want to see under this system (*clap clap clapclapclap*), I do have to say that it makes some sense.
The last Red Sox game I went to, I was surrounded by New Englanders. Not transplants–people who came to Seattle to watch the Sox. Getting box seats to a Sox game (or the Yanks, especially in the new stadium, or Cubs, or Indians) is hard enough that there’s a cottage industry in sending their fans into the diaspora to watch games. I saw one of the last Expo games at Olympic Stadium, and nearly everyone around me had flown up from Chicago for the game, because it was actually cheaper than getting comparable seats at Wrigley.
So no, they’re not guaranteed a better game. But they’re guaranteed to see their team, and some of them have spent hundreds already just for that.
On the flipside– the discount seats? That’s just an attempt to fill the stadium. Low turnout also means less beer, hats and hot dogs they get to sell. They’d just better hope those games are in mid-summer, when people are willing to suffer a horrible game just to be out in the sun with a brewski. You’d have to pay me to watch an M’s/Royals game in April, at the Safe.
As a season ticket holder for the last 4 years I was irate when I discovered that I paid more for the Red Sox & Yankees games last year. It was done in an underhanded way. We were required to pre-pay for post season tickets because we stood a chance of being in contention late in the 2007 season. We were told that our deposit on post-season tickets, should we not actually make it into post season, would apply to our 2008 season ticket package. The first we heard that the prices had gone up was when we were required to pay the balance for 2008 tickets. And even then I had to wait until I actually got the tickets to find out how/why they had gone up.
Given the extremely apologetic tone of the 2009 season ticket notice I am certain that it is clear that the Mariners’ organization is desperate to try to fill the stadium. That letter and electronic invitations to meet the GM/get a free lunch and other “free” promotions still have not convinced me that I want to cough up the $4-figures to keep my seats, awesome as they are.