DON’T GET ME STARTED has a fear that the Buffalo Bills may not sell out too many games after following the lead of the Buffalo Sabres who introduced the “Variable Pricing” for the Sabres games.
You know the routine: You want to watch some of the best teams, tickets will be priced higher. They had so many different levels of prices. Better teams – you pay more. Lousy teams – you pay less – though the prices might still be high.
As I’ve noted before, I feel that families of four would be forking hard earned dollars to watch the games, especially the so-called Gold games.
Now the Buffalo Bills took the Sabres page and put it in the Bills pricing book. There are now 12 different pricing levels for Gold – Silver – and Bronze games. You want to watch New England in the top seat with your wife and two kids, tickets will cost you $520 dollars. That’s for one game.
Before going further, let me say that about a dozen years ago, I had 6 tickets in the club level in front of Ralph Wilson’s box around the 50 yard line. What did I pay for those 6 tickets? $2,600 total. That’s a shade over $60 a ticket for the best seat in the best location. Now $48 dollars will get you one of the more non-attractive seats in the house.
How can you develop fans if you out-price them for seeing some of the better teams in the league? Isn’t it interesting that for the first time in announcing the prices, the Bills neglected to give an average ticket price or standing in the league. Oh, they’ll probably come out later and say it’s in the bottom third of the league or something like that – which I don’t buy.
The point is that for well over 50 years, fans embraced pricing with one price for certain sections for all games. There was none of that “You want to see New England” or the better teams – fork over more loot.
And where in the present administration do they consider the Miami Dolphins as a rival. That ended almost 2 decades ago. Buffalo has more of a rivalry with, first, the New England Patriots and then the New Jets. The Miami rivalry ended in the mid=90s when Jim Kelly and Dan Marino retired and quite a bit of time since Buffalo ended Miami’s unbeaten streak against the Bills in the 70s. The rivalry ended when free agency came into the picture. Before that, you could always count on seeing the same player’s year-in-year-out creating a rivalry. How can you boo a player in one year, and then cheer for him the next when he joins your team.
As you can gather, I cannot embrace Variable Pricing since it puts a burden on many fans. That’s why I will never, ever pay for a Sabres game and I wonder how fans will react to the Bills following that route. I don’t think they’ll react kindly.
Oh – one more thing. I don’t think the Bills will buy out a remaining 1,000 tickets so it can be on television since they would be forced to fork over a bigger sum to the visiting team on Don’t Get Me Started.
Filed under: Don't Get Me Started
Tagged with: Art Wander, Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Sabres
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