Yarg! No Tool Tickets!

Ever wonder how people who don't bother to stand in line at the box office six hours before the tickets go on sale end up getting tickets to sold out shows? I have - the lazy bums! How dare they get tickets when I can't? Well, I went to my favorite search engine, Google.com, and did some research (because that's pretty much all I do all day anyway...) well, some people buy from scalpers on the street, other people buy from ticket resellers online! Sounded obvious after I discovered it - I mean, you can buy ANYTHING online it seems.

Perhaps you all already knew this, but in my curiosity, I dug deeper... here's one site that Sells Sold Out Tickets. Cleverly enough, it is called "Sold Out Solutions". clever! So, you go to that site and look for your Tool Tickets and (this may not be the case any more) you see you can get ONE ticket for a lot of money. At this point, I'm thinking that people who buy tickets this way must be horribly wealthy... I mean, the 56 bucks for a standard ticket makes me cringe. It tells you where the seat is (6th row, floor - not bad!) and that there are two of them.

However, not satisfied with the one site I found, I look for more to see if there are other tickets available... I find another ticket reseller called "Buy Chicago Tickets" which nevertheless sells more than tickets in and around the Chicago area, and they have what appears to be the same exact tickets, but for a different price.

In fact, each ticket reseller I come across has a different price for these tickets. I start noticing a pattern, though, and I dig deeper... It turns out that a majority of these ticket reseller sites are actually all working for a ticket network of some kind, and they get their tickets from the main network - whomever sells the tickets from their site gets the credit. It's like earning commission. It's certainly an interesting idea, though. Anyway - now I wonder if the scalpers on the street are independents who got in the line early just to buy out tickets so people like me can't have them, or if they are working for a ticket reseller, too? There's really no way to know, is there? Although, they are probably independent people, I think it's against the law to sell things on the street like that. That's why beggars are allowed to beg on the street, they're apparently allowed to sit there, they are technically allowed to have a sign, but they're not allowed to touch you or even to talk to you and ask for cash.

And now that I've gone off on a rant, I'm going to let this one go for now, and just lament that I cannot go see Tool. :(