Commentary

Not fast enough for Swift tickets

By Susan Orandi Johnson

My 14-year-old daughter loves Taylor Swift and her teenage storytelling style of country music. My co-worker's daughter is a huge fan, too. We knew Taylor was coming to town, so when tickets went on sale at exactly 10 a.m. last Friday, we were ready.

We set up at three different laptops, credit cards at the ready and fingers on the keyboards. At 9:59 I yelled to the next room, "Refresh your screen!"

The website came up and we began the process: Choose the number of tickets, one through six; click "find tickets;" type the wiggly word in the box designed to prevent massive ticket grabbing by professionals; hit "continue," and wait. The little spinny circle of dots showed up and the screen informed us that our wait would be 15 minutes. So we waited, with a mixture of hope and fear.

It didn't take that long before the computer flashed the message: There were no matches for our request. Please try again.

By then, the tickets were gone. Where did they all go?

A quick check of the Internet finds plenty for sale by the people we used to call scalpers. Tickets in the nosebleed sections that originally went for $25 now sell for $100. Seats on the floor and lower levels, about $60 at the box office, now are upwards of $800 or even $1,000. How is this possible?

Ticket scalping used to be illegal in Minnesota. You could get 90 days in jail and a hefty fine if you sold tickets for more than their face value. But in 2007, the Minnesota Legislature joined 41 other states and repealed its anti-scalping law. So now almost anyone looking to make a buck on a popular event, say a Taylor Swift concert, can do so, legally.

And you can bet these people are masters of the on-line ticket buying system. They don't fumble around the site with shaky fingers like we do. They get to that spinny circle of dots faster than you can say, "You Belong With Me."

So, what's a parent to do?

If you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on resold tickets, you could master the re-dial function on your phone and take your chances with a local radio station giveaway. Or you could just settle for the CD. We got ours for $13.99.

Susan Orandi Johnson, a former radio producer, lives with her family in Eagan.