So I broke down and decided to go ahead and attend the Butch Walker show in Atlanta coming up on November 18, 2005. This show will pretty much be the end of his tour and then he’ll be back in the studio to record a new album. So this will be the last chance to see him perform live for a bit.
Mobile is 328 miles from Atlanta (so says Google Maps). Multiply that by two for both legs of the trip and you get 656 miles round trip. My truck gets between 17 and 20 mpg. Gas is running about $2.70/gallon so the total fuel costs will be:
Worst Case – 656 miles / 17 mpg * $2.70/gallon = $104.19
Best Case – 656 miles / 20 mpg * $2.70/gallon = $ 88.56
Hotel Room for 2 nights will be around $80/night so $160 lodging.
Then of course there is the little matter about the tickets to the show. The face value of the tickets is $18/ticket, but I’m sure from the title of this post, you know it didn’t cost me $36 for two tickets.
Not even close. Behold the audacity and greedy disregard to the fans and the artists that ticketmaster has.
Good thing I’m a big fan, because something about an $18.50 premium added to $36 dollars of tickets seems wrong. And hey Ticketmaster, that “Convenience” charge doesn’t feel very convenient to me. And the Order Processing Charge…..shouldn’t that be part of the “Convenience” charge. Oh and the Ticketfast Delivery charge you see there. That’s e-mail. They are e-mailing me tickets to print out myself. If I trusted the good old US Postal service, I could have them mailed to me for no charge (which I might add is a larger expense to Ticketmaster than e-mailing them to me). Yes, expensive trip, but I am a fan. But Ticketmaster is still a very, very bad organization.
It is true. There are just a few absolute evils in this world, and Ticketmaster is one of them.