Corporate Devils

Sometimes a good expletive gets the point across perfectly. Like:

"Are you fuckin' shittin' me?!?"

That might be one of my favorites. Because I'm pretty sure people are shittin' me all the time. Now that I see it written I'm not sure exactly what "shittin' me" could mean literally, but I am sure that it means people are being idiots. Whether these people are individuals or a group of people known as a corporation depends on how I'm being shitted.

That expletive up there is exactly what I thought when I went to see how much tickets to the Flyers-Devils PRESEASON game on September 26th cost. My fiance has never really seen an NHL game down low, or actually in the bottom level at all. We've always pretty much gone top shelf when we hit the big time. Now East Coast League games are a different story - you could probably sit in a little Mini-Me backpack on the leading scorer's back for an extra $20. But these guys in the NHL are fast giants and that puck moves even faster than you can imagine if you've never seen it up close. I want her to see why I even love the game - how beautifully chaotic it is at it's highest level. And seeing that is so much easier from down low, or at least so much more impressive.

So when I got to the website and saw seats that were anywhere near where I was hoping to sit, in NEWARK, for a PRESEASON game were over $250 I knew, I just knew, someone was shittin' me.

One of my favorite things to do is to picture how these big corporate meetings go down. I'd have to say I've been in about, no joke (220 working days a year over 5 years with at least 2 meetings a day) two thousand meetings around a big corporate table with 8 or more corporate robots, so even though that's not 10,000 hours I'd consider myself an expert on the subject. And this is how it goes. They look at the Prudential Center's preseason ticket sales for the last two years and try to figure out ways to get more seats filled at the regular price by using the only tools they are familiar with - more splash pages, billboards, pop-up ads, and Subway cross-promotions. They don't for one second think "Let's sell every ticket in the house for $10, we'll have a lottery." If you suggested that they'd tell you that you need to reprocess your actionable takeaways because you're mis-underestimating the logistics and statistics. Then you'd think "you have got to be fuckin' shittin' me," and they totally would be, but they'd just continue on with their default future.

Could you imagine a packed house for a PRESEASON game? I mean 100% capacity. Could you picture the buzz of the lottery? First of all, I went to this game last year and all the $10 seats, which there are few, were full. There were about 4k other people there at the most. At the very most. If you sold 19k tickets for $10 a piece you make 200k on just the tickets alone - a pittance. But think about the concessions and souvenirs. You get all that stuff cooking too. Let's say last year those 4k people paid an average of $80 a ticket, and keep in mind I'm being very generous on both accounts, the difference in ticket sales won't ever show up on even a monthly finance report. So basically there is no difference.

But if you think long-term, like I think these mafia drones would, imagine the marketing power of this promotion. Converting new fans, getting people interested in the product, getting kids into hockey in general. Those are things you can't calculate as Return on Investment so the CFO is never going to sign off on them, but just because you can't measure it with a calculator doesn't mean it's not real.

At least go halfsies you assdicks.

And I intend on telling my tv this from my couch in Brooklyn on the 26th. Because, to be honest with you, it's just not worth it.