Progmatism.com

Presenting paragrasp 1.02, dedicated to Robert Baber, who bugged me to make an update for Firefox 1.501.

Recently the evil hellspawn known as Ticketmaster featured a customer survey on their site. Feeling spunky I filled it out, but denied entering the spam-riddled raffle they featured at the end.

Here's my response for the open-ended section:

I attend a large number of small to medium sized concerts in and around the New York area, typically one every two weeks. Most of the venues I go to have a low capacity, meaning shows sell out often and usually in advance. As a result, the only way I can attend such events is using Ticketmaster. If I had any alternative, I would choose it every time instead. A small part of my soul dies whenever I'm forced to feed this all-consuming, monopolistic, money hungry beast. The number of establishments that are locked into exclusive contracts is truly disheartening, since it means that I'm repeatedly forced to accept things like Convenience Charges (which nearly double what I pay), awful site usability (nearly invisible font sizes, questionable information placement, and fragile flow state), forced time limits per page (my lagging internet connection barely renders each page with enough time remaining for me to fill it out), and captcas that often do not load correctly. Event information is also very thin; in this specific instance the artist I want to see was not listed on the bill (only the headliner was), so I had to search by venue instead, then weed through the non-applicable results. I have nothing against most businesses, however Ticketmaster treats its customers so poorly that I really can't help myself. Worst of all, with more and more event promoters and organized joining forces, thing will only get more homogenized, meaning there's no possibility that this situation will improve in the slightest. But at least you don't sue your customers, which is a plus.

I'm not expecting a reply.