Without Your Customers, You Are Nothing.


I bought a ticket to see New Order on Friday. There was a miscommunication at home. Though, to be fair to me, Christmas is always an incredibly busy time, and tickets for this show went on sale only 5 weeks before the gig. If I were to rank bands in order of how much I want to see them, the two ones I am keenest to see, the bands I love, are also the ones that went on sale after I bought tickets for bands I like but not love. It's a busy few weeks. If I had to choose to see just one of the bands I am seeing over the next two months, it'd be New Order. I saw them so rarely, and for a decade after I discovered them in 1988, they were my Holy Grail. The band I would never see.

So, come time tickets go on sale, I have six browser windows open. Incidentally, its the exact same minute the Red Hot Chilli Peppers put on sale 240,000 tickets for Knebworth. On the venue website I add ticket to the cart, and the ticket "sells out" whilst I am typing in my card details. The other one goes straight to the balcony. The third one offers me a standing ticket, and I purchase it. It is only in my haste I do not realise there's a pre-ticked box for "INSURANCE CANCELLATION FEE". £1.50.

It's the first time I've seen one of these, and so I don't know what I was looking for. Now I do. (It's a "Dark Pattern", and there's a fascinating lecture/talk here about the use of human psychology to generate revenue and piss off people. The creation of these dark patterns uses human beings and our ways of thinking to decieve us with their ways of working. The method is called Sneak Into Basket. And whilst it cost me £1.50, primarily because I was in a hurry, and I've never experienced this mechanism before, what this means is that my already subterrean experiences with SeeTickets (as briefly detailed here, whereby they took the money and canclled the ticket, and the time they delivered my tickets to my old address, that was signed for by someone who clearly wasn't me, and pretended it was nothing to do with them.

So, now, I'm going to try and find someone else to buy my gig tickets from. If I ever have a chance to. How fucking dare they sneak items into my basket, and charge me money for something I never actually wanted. I'll buy my tickets from someone else.
- posted by Mark @ 9:22 pm