The Trump inauguration is looking like it is going to be an interesting bit of theatre. The only musical acts left are in the calibre of 3 Doors Down and Toby Keith, after a Bruce Springsteen cover band pulled out thanks to backlash. The chair of the inauguration committee says that “soft sensuality” will be the theme, whatever the hell that means.
But now it looks like the noblest class of human, the humble ticket scalper, is also not having a great time of it. According to a report in the New York Daily News, crafty people who scored tickets to the inauguration early and are trying to flip them for massive profits are finding that it’s not that easy to sell them off.
They spoke to Yossi Rosenberg, 36, of upper Manhattan, a liberal and Hillary voter who landed two tickets to the inauguration for $700 and assumed he could flip them for double, is finding that no one is interested. Not even the people who said they would buy them, before he made the investment.
“Nobody wants to buy them,” Rosenberg told The News. “It looks like I’m stuck with them, I might even have to go.”
The horror. Look at the pic they’ve run with – the bloke looks thoroughly devastated:
He says he’s even visited white supremacist websites like The Daily Stormer – which have been strongly pro-Trump spaces since the primaries – and is still having no luck. I’d be interested to know what his pitch to the Nazis would be.
Of course, this is also possibly a sledge on liberals like Rossenberg who think they can sell tickets for $700 apiece when there are currently perfectly serviceable ones on Craigslist for as little as $175. Which is still a steep ask considering many of them were initially issued for free.
But maybe not! A report in The Hill in December indicated that many people were flogging tickets for that much back then – and sometimes even more:
Several of the coveted seated views of the ceremony are also on sale on a site called GreatSeats.com. One ticket in a prime section on the West Front of the Capitol is being hawked for a whopping $14,700, while others are for sale for as much as $6,900. Another seller on the site is aiming to fetch nearly $2,000 for a standing-room ticket.
Either way, demand has radically declined. Sorry Yossi. You’ll just have to go to the ceremony, I reckon. Have a good time, mate.
Source: New York Daily News.
Photo: Getty Images / Drew Angerer.
