Convenience--What’s It Worth? : Fee Puts Tickets a Call or a Short Trip Away

The Calendar report on Ticketmaster (“A Tangle Over Tickets,” June 9) and the subsequent letters to the editor (“The Price People Pay to Purchase Their Tickets,” June 13) make us realize that people don’t understand the nature of this business and what services we perform.

You pay more for full-serve gasoline than you do for self-serve. Most consumers pay a membership fee for the use of their credit card. A doctor charges more for a house call than for an office visit. These conveniences are a service and a service costs both the user and the provider.

Ticketmaster is also in the business of convenience. And for the convenience of a phone call or a short trip to a ticket outlet, a service charge is added to concert, sporting or other tickets to pay for the cost of doing business.

This service is a complex, computerized and labor-intensive business. Ticketmaster has 183 outlets in Southern California and 150 operators, all of whom have access to the same pool of tickets.

Tickets are an emotional issue, ranging from the cost to the availability, but the facts are clear:

* In 1991, Southern California Ticketmaster operators answered 13,250,000 calls. Of these, five out of six were for information and resulted in no fees to Ticketmaster.

* Ticketmaster provides all local number prefixes--213, 310, 714, 805 and 619--so there are no toll calls or 900 numbers for consumers.

* All Ticketmaster charges are set by contract with the arenas or venues; Ticketmaster is a concessionaire much like Pepsi or Coke, food, parking, etc.

* Seats are limited: Half of the seats are in the front of the house and half are in the back of the house. That means not everyone can have the best seat. The computer’s program sells tickets from the front to the back on a best-seat available basis.

* Ticketmaster neither requires nor requests box offices to close. That decision belongs to the box office.

* Some box offices choose to close on the first day of sales because of security reasons or because they are not centrally located and only brokers show up. These brokers buy large blocks of tickets and double, triple or even quadruple the ticket price for resale.

Ticketmaster is proud to have built its business on delivering service and value to the public. As a result, the outlets have grown from 35 in 1983 to 183, and the telephone room has grown from 25 operators to 150. We are proud of building a business founded on American technology, ingenuity and solid work ethic and that operates on a very small profit margin. The fact is that Ticketmaster-Southern California Inc. earns about 1.2% of gross ticket sales after tax.

In addition, Ticketmaster is a multiethnic company that employs more than 600 people in Southern California and is located in the Mid-Wilshire District in Los Angeles.

When Ticketmaster came to California, Ticketron was already in the marketplace, and we made a significant investment to do business in this state. Ticketron’s inefficiencies caused them substantial losses. As a result, they were unable to find a buyer and were forced to cease operations. Today, many companies are competing with us in the marketplace. The venues control their own tickets. Each building has the ability to buy an in-house system and computerize its box office and answer its own telephones as the Los Angeles Dodgers have done, or contract with another ticket company as the San Diego Padres and California State Parks have done, and own their own system as the Shuberts have done. There are more than 75 companies trying to sell their systems to venues today. Clearly, Ticketmaster is not a “monopoly.”

There are those, however, who are anti-business and resent corporate profits. Businesses that have risen to the challenge and have been successful are suspect. This philosophy is not healthy for our economy, which is already suffering through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Instead of introducing legislation to essentially put Ticketmaster out of business, as some in Sacramento have done, and instead of encouraging the filing of class action lawsuits, government should be encouraging successful businesses that provide jobs and contribute to the tax base.

Ticketmaster has always been a consumer-driven company. We are active in many charities and have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the City of Hope, Pediatric AIDS, Neil Bogart Labs and many other charities. When our employees were called to the Gulf War, we subsidized their salaries so they lost no money while they served our country. When they returned home, their jobs were waiting for them.

When our employees could not work during the civil disturbances (our office was closed), we paid all of our people their full salaries. We understood this was a time to begin the healing process. Working with L.A. City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, Ticketmaster donated $20,000 to rebuild the Aquarian Bookstore and raised an additional $7,500. We are working with his office on other projects.

It is finally time to set the record straight. We are proud to be an American company and we are proud Ticketmaster started its growth in and calls California home.