The Royals are trying to go to a ticketless system this year. Under most circumstances I’m in favor of using computers to cut down on paper waste, especially as the tickets haven’t been all that attractive for the past two or three years. They even offered us $50 to try the new system.
However, we declined. Here’s why:
1. If we wanted to sell or otherwise transfer our e-tickets to anyone, we’d have to give the Royals all their contact information. So this starts to smell like the franchise’s attempt to increase its marketing database.
2. The $50 originally sounded like it would be a refund or a discount, but then it turned out to be a gift card. And as we all recall from their fabulous gift card giveaway in the wake of bulldozing our seats, the damn things are only good in the team store. You can’t even buy food with them.
3. And this one’s the real kicker: the Royals are too messed up to ever pull this off. The franchise has a intensely well-deserved reputation for treating its fans with incompetent disrespect. Case in point: we were supposed to get All Star ticket info in September, and it finally arrived last week (January according to the calendar on the wall). Was it really four months worth of difficult to make sure the Sports Authority got first dibs on all the tickets it wanted?
So the ticketless thing just conjures nightmare visions of being trapped outside the ballpark unless and until someone on the staff can be summoned to straighten out the almost-completely-inevitable problems with the system. I’m sure we all remember being marched around the ballpark and regaled with the finer qualities of Lou Piniella while waiting for the factotum armada to straighten out a fail with old fashioned they’ve-had-decades-to-get-this-right paper tickets.
I think we’ll let them use someone else as guinea pigs for this one.
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