The New York Times' Richard Sandomir worries that the Yankees' recent price cuts could spur some sort of class warfare at The Stadium:
Why not cut more ticket prices at Yankee Stadium, not just the really expensive ones?
The Yankees' move Tuesday to slash the price of slower-selling premium seats, including the $2,500 perches, and give away others affects a few hundred seats. It was a cosmetic move to quell criticism and put more bodies in front of television cameras. There are only 100 seats priced for season-ticket plans at $2,500 — and only 55 to 60 have been sold. The Yankees' strategy exacerbates the visible divide between fans in exclusive areas and the tens of thousands outside of club access . . .
. . . The Yankees' philosophy must be this: if sections are sold out — or if they don't get much camera time — we must have priced the seats correctly.
Well, yeah. If in fact those sections are sold out, they are by definition priced correctly. That's how supply and demand works.
More generally speaking, while I've been as critical as anyone about the pricing at Yankee Stadium and the overall elitist vibe the team seems to be going for in the new park, the Yankees are not a public trust. They're a business. If their pricing decisions lead to silly results (i.e. empty seats), they should be ridiculed. If they simply make people angry while continuing to make good business sense -- in this case sold out houses -- it ain't their problem.
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Sandomir writes of the incredible outrage: the Yankees "exacerbate the visible divide between the fans in the exclusive areas and the tens of thousands outside club access...."
Bold words written by Sandomir. I wonder if the idea came to him between bites of pastrami sandwiches and sips of cold Heineken from the sportswriters' spread up in the Stadium's fancy press box......
Yes, they are not a public trust, but who paid for that stadium? The public. Who can't afford to go to that stadium? The public. If they had paid for that stadium with their own money, yes, leave them alone, but did they? No, they didn't.
True, but that doesn't change the fact that if seats are selling out, all cutting the prices will do is transfer profits to ticket scalpers. Not that there's anything wrong with ticket scalpers, but that isn't your goal here.
If they're sold out, aren't they probably priced too low? If increasing prices by 30% (just pulling this out of my marsupium) lowers attendance by 5%, then it's a smart thing to do.
Consider this, you have two rivals, The New York Yankees in the brand new stadium, who is having problems selling their high priced seats. Take the Boston Red Sox, who has one of the oldest ball parks, one of the smallest, but have continued to have sell outs. So my question would be who's doing a better job selling season tickets? This was about only two teams, but yet there were other teams who built new stadiums, ball parks, did they go through the same problems the New York Yankee's are having today? Or could a lot of this problem be the result of a sluggish economy?