By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Lifestyle Editor
There has been a lot of talk and media coverage about the high cost of concert tickets, especially for Bruce Springsteen tickets as Ticketmaster posted the cost of some seats for $4,000 and $5,000.
My first reaction was “what do they think this is, the Super Bowl?”
Regular seats are $300, $400, $500 and even $600. And it’s not just for the Boss. A friend and I looked into Jimmy Buffett tickets here in San Diego and the “cheapest” we could find cost $300. We quickly decided that was ridiculous and decided to go and party like Parrotheads in the parking lot tailgate party and if we stumble upon tickets for around $100 or less to then we would go into the show.
The price of the cheap seats used to be the cost of an entire weekend at music festivals like Coachella and now this is the price for one artist and one show? Coachella tickets by the way, are $499, $549 and $599 for the weekend GA; that almost seems like a bargain in light of the cost of single concert tickets.
But it doesn’t end there. In fact, that’s just the beginning of the high cost of going to a concert because not only are the ticket prices sky high, so are the concession prices. And it’s not just concerts; the same is true for sporting events, too.
My Men Who Blog friend and fellow blogger James Hills and his wife Heather gave me a pair of tickets to Padres game because they were unable to attend it. It just so happened to be what I call “opening night for Juan Soto” and the atmosphere was like that of a World Series. Naturally, I first went to a concession stand to get a beer and nearly fainted when I saw the cost of tall can of Bud and Bud Light was $15.
Fifteen dollars! For a Budweiser!? I went outside to Kona beer station and those were $16. I opted instead for a Cutwater Spirits canned margarita (two shots of tequila!) which was a more down-to-earth $12.
With college football upon us and coaching salaries of $10 million and up a year, ridiculous money grabs like USC and UCLA going to the Big 10, the Name Image and Likeness deals having boosters act like they are at SMU in the 80s (without worrying about getting the school in trouble for cheating), I looked at the ticket prices for game as some of the top programs.
USC, which has a new coach and finally some optimism from fans that they finally have someone in charge who knows what he’s doing, is selling single-game tickets in the highest seats of the Coliseum for $115 for a Pac-12 game.
You can get lower for $155 but they do have a great package of all home games for a very reasonable $349 and that includes the Notre Dame game. USC is one of the few schools that sells beer so add that to your budget, plus however much food costs (a lot, $15 at least for ballpark food), parking at $40 or more and it’s still a lot cheaper to go to a bar or watch the game from home. But you do miss out on the cool atmosphere of being at the game with the Song Girls, the band, Traveler and pre-game and all the fun elements that make up a college football game.
At Alabama, a ticket to the Mississippi State game is not bad at $75; that will place you in a top row at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Alabama is one of a few SEC schools that will likely sell beer at the games but at what price? At Ohio State, it will cost you $400-500 to get a ticket to the Notre Dame game. But you can see Indiana for less than $60! At Georgia, I had to go to Stub Hub to find seats because none were listed on the athletic department’s website and the prices ranged from $44 for Mississippi State to $200 for Auburn.
In the NFL, you can see the Rams at the 49ers for less than $100 (Ticketmaster). It’s $36 to $318 for a Giants game on StubHub (that’s the difference in the Texans and Packers, folks) and the price for a Dallas Cowboys game at Jerry’s World against Tom Brady is $175-$300.
So if you just want to go to a college or NFL game just for the heck of it to experience the game-day atmosphere, the ticket prices are not that bad. But if you want to see a premium game you’ll pay premium prices for it, concert-like prices, in fact.
Just remember to add in concessions. Or consume pretty much everything ahead of time at the tailgate party, which is the PubClub.com way regardless of the sky-high concession prices. This is our approach for both sporting events and concerts.
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