The Price is Wrong!

The prices of show tickets these days are crazy, right? Who would pay over $500 for a silly little comedy/music/magic variety show?

Well, we don't think anybody should. At least not for ours. But far too often we see comments on social media along the lines of "$500 for tickets? Good for her, but that's way too rich for my blood."

Those comments led us to discover a few things.

First, ticket resellers are just plain super greedy. We kind of knew that going in, but didn't realize the extent of it. For example, the most expensive City Winery tickets were $50, and if you had asked us what we thought the aftermarket prices were, we'd top out at $100 in extreme cases, especially when the tickets were still available directly from the venue. But no, we saw them listed for as high as $1200.

Secondly, those extraordinarily high prices are very likely an anchoring tool. Anchoring is a negotiation tactic where you start at a price that is much higher than you want to be paid, so when a counteroffer comes in it's more in line with what you wanted in the first place. In ticket reselling, you'll see a few listings for ridiculous prices ($500, $750, $1000), and a seemingly much more reasonable price ($200) for another listing. But our brains don't immediately think "those are all priced way too high" - instead they think "that $200 ticket is quite the deal." So they probably never intended to sell that $1000 ticket - they just wanted you to buy the $200 one.

Thirdly, you can’t blindly trust search engines. The way many people are getting to these reseller sites is by going to a search engine and typing "Lucy Darling tickets" and clicking on the first link, which is almost always a bad site.

Actual prices for an actual show. (And before it even went on sale!)

What can we do about this?

We can't stop resellers. A lot of it is predatory, but it's not illegal. But we can help direct people to our website which gives links to official places to buy tickets. If you see someone posting about prices far exceeding the face value, please direct them to https://www.carisahendrix.com/tour so they can purchase from official sources.

Whenever we can, we like to offer presale codes to those who specifically voted for that city (or somewhere reasonably nearby). That keeps out a good number of reseller bots. We watch the ticket sales for the first half hour and we see them snapped up, yes, but not in blocks of eight. They are mostly going in pairs, which is a good indicator they are going to fans, not resellers. Also when we look at resale sites, we very rarely see tickets in the front rows. It’s not perfect, but it does seem to be working.

But our shows often sell out, and the secondary market may be the only way to get tickets. We're not going to tell you how to spend your money, but we can lay down our own anchor. On our tour page, we list the range of actual ticket prices for each show. That way you can be better informed when making a purchase decision. Keep in mind, though, that our listed prices may not include taxes and fees, which vary from place to place (and that's a whole other upsetting thing I don't want to get into). But those fees are not going to double or triple that ticket price. If we say a ticket is $75 on our site, a vendor may add $15-$20 in fees, but no way is that ticket going to approach $150 or more.

And finally, we should make it clear that we do not handle tickets ourselves. Nobody on the team is able to sell you a ticket, or exchange your ticket, or reissue a lost ticket. If you ask, we are only going to direct you to the venue's website which you can find linked on our tour pages. And if you get a message from a team member (or even Carisa) offering to sell you a ticket, it’s a scammer.

So be on the lookout for your fellow Darlings, and don't let them pay high prices unnecessarily.

“I’m an honest person with extra tickets. What are my options?”

For any number of perfect legitimate reasons, you may find yourself with tickets you cannot use. And you shouldn’t be stuck with them when someone else would be delighted to have them. My number one suggestion is to find a friend (or friend of a friend) who wants them, as that's the easiest and most trustworthy way, plus you’ll get to hear about the great time they had.

If you don’t know anyone who can use them, then you’ll need to turn to strangers on the internet. If you are willing to give your tickets away for free, then we’ll be okay with you offering them in comments on social media posts. We don’t want selling/trading going on there, because it will only encourage scammers to come in and it will be impossibly to tell them apart from the honest people. Also remember that you should delete or edit your comment once they are claimed, or you'll be private messaged about it until the end of time.

If you can’t afford to give them away, the last resort would be (ugh) a site like StubHub, but you can be a hero and offer them at the same price you paid, a bold middle finger to the opportunistic resellers.

Addendum

Shortly after posting this, a couple of venues did a weird thing where they started allowing “certified resale” tickets to be sold alongside our actual normal tickets. Another implemented something called “dynamic pricing” which raises prices if a show is selling well, something we are adamantly opposed to. If it weren’t such a vile practice the timing would make it hilarious. So, yes, it looks like we are hypocrites for saying “don’t buy from resellers and don’t pay above these prices; also here are links that go to resellers and arbitrarily jack up the prices.” I promise you we did not authorize those actions and have asked them to stop.