Every event requires tickets, no matter the occasion. It could be your favorite artist performing at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, a Ducks game or a needed visit at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival. You’re practically dying to go, you open the website and it slaps you with a “Sold Out” sign, and you’re suddenly on the prowl for tickets for your destined gig. 

You scour the internet looking for your true love: an affordable ticket. You check the supposed “fan-to-fan” sellers on eBay and Stubhub, but are only met with tickets not only double or triple, but six times the original price. You’re left with no other option but to watch the event from home or reminisce in shallow loneliness and heavy amounts of FOMO. Ticket resale simply takes away from the average citizen. 

This pattern is experienced by millions of people due to the expensive ticket touting market. The recent skyrocketing inflation that the majority of the population can’t keep up with combined with the resellers’ needed profit is only a recipe for disaster, which results in event attendees and the ticket-required events themselves becoming more scarce. It’s plainly unfair to consumers, whether resellers are in the picture or not. 

Take, for example, Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, which involved 600,000 people in the Edinburgh, Scotland ticket queue, while the venue could only fit one-tenth of the queue. That means the other 540,000 fans fought for their tickets, but were evidently left ticketless. 

Then again, ticket scalping may also have benefits for the consumer, as well as the reseller. If timed correctly, ticket reselling can bring convenience to consumers, as they can also score deals on costly tickets and be given a second chance to go to their looked-forward-to event. Plus, the increase in demand for online occupations and simpler ways to generate money leads to reselling as a whole. It allows people to have a job, increase revenue and helps the event by giving them more of an audience. 

To solve this problem, an idea would be to offer a cap on how many people are allowed to resell tickets. It offers a middle ground solution so there is a fair number of tickets available for the audience, while also making room for the reseller.