Zen and the Art of Ticket Scalping
Recently I finished Robert Cialdini's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", which "explains the psychology of why people say 'yes'" in situations that they otherwise would not have. I highly recommend reading the book, there are some incredible discoveries in it. In essence, though, Cialdini boils it down to six central concepts:
- Reciprocation
- Commitment and Consistency
- Social Proof
- Liking
- Authority
- Scarcity
My mom was in New York this past weekend, helping me settle in to my new apartment. While she was here, we wanted to see a show. On the top of both our lists was Wicked. Unfortunately, because we didn't plan ahead, and being that it's so popular, there are no tickets available online and no half price tickets at TKTS, which that left us with two options, scalpers or the lottery.
Not being sure that we could get tickets via the lottery, my ears perked up when I heard a guy on the street saying he had Wicked tickets. He had three for the sold out matinée, $110 each, marked down by a group discount from $135. He said he had forty tickets at the beginning of the day, but had sold all but these three. He said that the show was so popular they had stopped doing the lottery. He also said that if we bought them and tried to sell them outside the theater, we could get over $200 for them.
Knowing that Iris wanted to see it too, I called her up to see if she wanted to take the third ticket. He graciously held the tickets while I talked to her about it, several times telling other people that the tickets were held and he could not sell them because we were there first.
Because she's pretty level-headed about these things, she had a couple questions: Were the tickets legit? They looked good, serial numbers and all. Were they for today at the right time? Yup. But something didn't sit right. I asked her to go to the computer to double check. What row is it? JJ. What seats? 12, 14, and 16. Are they really together? Yeah, even means one side, odd means the other. How much would they cost online? Well, those seats are in the back of the mezzanine, usually $62.50 for a Sunday matinée.
And there it was, he was lying to us. We kindly told him that, no, we would not be buying tickets from him, and he kindly told us to fuck off.
I had approached him with care, just having read the Cialdini book, but I was still tempted to buy from him. It turns out, the methods he was using to draw us in were straight out of the book:
- Reciprocation - He did us a "favor" by holding the tickets while I was on the phone with Iris, though we had not asked him to. By doing this, he made us indebted to him, making us more likely to buy the tickets.
- Commitment and Consistency - We clearly stated an interest in seeing Wicked, not buying the tickets would go against all the desires we had already indicated.
- Social Proof - He combined Social Proof with Scarcity by telling us that the show was, as always, sold out, and that even he was almost sold out. So many people like it that there aren't any tickets available anywhere.
- Liking - He spoke to us as if we were his friends, chatting us up, seeming to take an interest in us.
- Authority - He told us on several occasions that Wicked is one of the best shows ever created, that it is the most magical, incredible show we'd ever see.
- Scarcity - Tickets were so scarce that they even stopped doing the lottery, because they were selling out so often.
Though it ended up being a somewhat stressful and negative interaction, it was very enlightening to see how someone could string together the forces of psychology to make what would normally seem like a dubious, shady deal so attractive. Had it not been for the time that calling Iris gave me to think about the book, combined with her trepidation, we may have bought those tickets, and regretted it afterwards. Instead, we forwent the tickets and saved our money for something else.
Oh, and in the end, we won tickets in the ticket lottery. Front row. For only $26.25. It was incredible!
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