A few weeks ago I managed to pick up some Pearl Jam tickets directly from TicketBastard, since I missed out on the fan club pre-sale for the second show. The experience isn’t alltogether painful as their servers have the common courtesy to not lose cookies or randomly crash in the middle of large rushes for tickets. Instead, you just have to wait the actual 5-10 minutes that the progress bar displays for your order to pop up. Unfortunately, my order popped up with a copy of their new CD (which I fully intend to pre-order directly from them) in the cart at the ridiculous price of $16.99. Despite their claims that I would be able to remove the CD, I was stuck with it if I wanted the tickets.
Much to my surprise, this weekend I received an e-mail from their customer service describing the bug that had prevented customers from removing the CD from the bin and included instructions for cancelling that portion of the order. “Wow,” I thought, “Those jerks actually did something right – they actually fixed their mistake.” So it occurred to me that I should write a post describing what a wonderful thing TicketBastard had done in order to right this wrong. Songs should be sung about them and tales told long into the night as we feast over wild boar and flowing stouts. Perhaps a statue in their honor shall be erected.
Then I began to wonder why I should praise a company that charges me an extra $8-$10 just for the right to buy a ticket for fixing their mistake. Do they really deserve any publicity for simply not being completely devoid of ethics?
No, no they don’t. So I guess I won’t write about this afterall…
Seriously, I think Ticketmaster should be paying me these days for keeping them in business.
I don’t know if fixing their own mistake is really something they should be credited for… isn’t that what people and businesses are supposed to do? I mean, otherwise I would have just denied the charge to my credit card as I do with all companies that try to fuck with me and charge me for things I don’t want or screw up my orders (yes Zoots, I’m talking about you ) so it’s probably better for them that they don’t have to deal with thousands of angry calls from credit card companies.