Champs tickets – it’s all about supply and demand
DEATH AND the paying of taxes are said to be the two inevitable occurrences that await every man and woman. If you are a Jamaican, you can add to that list, listening to, or partaking in, the annual, and seemingly inevitable arguments that surround the staging of the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Championships.
Every year at this time there is great controversy regarding the staging of ‘Champs’. Usually the arguments surround the difficulty of getting grandstand tickets for the Saturday. One year it was about the ‘big three’ schools insisting that they should be given a bigger allocation of tickets than the other schools. Who can forget the big brouhaha surrounding the African Ari Rodgers a few years ago?
This year the discussions have been raging on about the new pricing system. ISSA has raised the grandstand prices and are coming under fire from several quarters. For the record, the price of a season ticket for the ‘regular’ areas has gone up from $9,000 to $13,500. The premium package has gone up from $10,000 to $15,000. The cost of the grandstand ticket for Friday remains the same $3,500, but the Saturday grandstand prices have moved from $5,000 to $7,500. The bleachers prices are the same, $500 on Friday and $1,500 for Saturday.
A lot of people feel that ISSA is overcharging people to come to witness Champs. On one radio programme, one man said this is a rip-off. The people bashing ISSA need to understand the basic principle of supply and demand. Where demand is exceedingly higher than supply, prices will go up.
It’s as simple as that. Grandstand tickets for the Saturday (and to a lesser extent the Friday) at ‘Champs’ are the hardest things to get your hands on every year simply because, as my granny would say, there are far more dogs than bones. ISSA has the right, indeed the duty, to maximise on this demand.
As much as some of us would want to think otherwise, the event is not merely a stage where our high-school athletes get a platform to show off their talent. It is also an event that is there to generate income for the governing body of high school sports. No amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth will change the fact that the organisers of ‘Champs’ will continue to capitalise on the popularity of the event by charging more and more to get in.
REASONS
ISSA has said that one of the reasons for the price increases is that the grandstand patrons will get effectively a greater watching experience with some of the plans they have. For me all of that is so much mumbo jumbo. ISSA is charging as much as 50 per cent more in some instances for one reason. They know, or believe, (it doesn’t matter) that these price hikes will not stop a full grandstand for the final day.
People may grumble but that won’t stop the same numbers from coming in. Nobody with an understanding of how business works should blame them. People will argue that the thing is too expensive but that is all relative. As long as people want the product and are willing to pay, then the term ‘expensive’ becomes a very subjective terminology.
Spending $30,000 on a pair of sneakers may be deemed expensive while spending the same amount on a plane ticket to England may be deemed cheap. It all depends on your perspective. Maybe ISSA has been underselling ‘Champs’ ticket for years.
Maybe the true value of a Saturday grandstand ticket should be $30,000.
Maybe that’s when ISSA will arrive at that happy medium where they might eliminate a lot of people, but there would still be enough who are prepared to pay and then the body would quadruple the revenue they now make.
So don’t blame ISSA. Blame the market. Blame us as Jamaicans who can’t get enough of ‘Champs’. ISSA is doing nothing wrong.