I'm planning on going to a show this week, so I purchased the tickets online. Now normally purchasing stuff online saves you money. There are no customer service reps to deal with or brick and mortar stores to maintain, so you usually save a few pennies. It's easier for you and easier for the retailer. That is, unless you're trying to buy tickets from the Spawn of Satan, a/k/a Ticketmaster.

Now, I don't mind spending the money to go out to a show. But being forced to deal with Ticketmaster really gets under my skin. First of all my tickets carried a 20% "convenience" fee. That means I had to pay 20% extra because I'm too lazy to drive down to the box office and buy the tickets in person during normal business hours.

Then, as if the "convenience" charge wasn't convenient enough, I had to pay an extra $2.75 for "order processing". That's nearly three bucks just to ring them up and charge my credit card.

Now I've dealt with Ticketmaster before, so the added "convenience" charge and "order processing" fee were no big surprise. But when I elected to get e-tickets instead of paper tickets, Ticketmaster tacked on another $4.00 "delivery" charge. That's not shipping and handling, because it's an e-ticket. That's an extra charge for automated delivery via email. Nobody had to print the ticket. Nobody even had to manually process my credit card or send out the email. From beginning to end, everything was handled by computer and it cost an extra 30%.

Normally I don't complain about these kind of things. After all, Ticketmaster has employees, computer systems, phone banks, and has to charge something to pay for it all. But is there any other way to buy tickets? For most venues and promoters, Ticketmaster is the only choice. And thus far they've managed to convince just about all the venues and promoters to sign exclusive agreements. So if you don't want to use ticketmaster, tough. You have to either use them or take your chances at the box office.

We can only hope that as the exclusive agreements start to expire that more venues and promoters will start to look for other ticket vendors. Ticketmaster's days of domination and high fees are numbered. It's just a question of when their stranglehold on the ticket market will be broken.