Friday, May 02, 2008

Boz Fails Economics

For fark's sake, Boz. Get your head out of your ass!

First, when is this guy going to stop writing about the goddamn stadium? We get it. We've seen it. We've read the same farkin' column for the last fourteen weeks.

But here he is, swallowing the Stan Kasten Kool Aid. Kasten's at the funnel, pouring gallon after gallon of Purplesaurus Rex, while the tube is shoved so far down Boz' gullet that it almost comes out his backside.
The Nats have 3,100 seats (including 1,200 in suites) that average about $180 a game. The impact of such seats is enormous. For $180, a normal fan could buy five good seats: one each in the box seats, the club level, the mezzanine, the gallery and the terrace -- all the basic sections of Nationals Park.

When you see someone in a Presidential Seat -- like Treasury Secretary Henry J. Paulson last week, sitting with friends in an otherwise empty section -- remember that every such seat generates the same cash as five seats at RFK. That's one reason more than 10,000 upper deck tickets at Nationals Park are reasonably priced.

Oy.

Those seats aren't priced $300 so that the Nats can have a few sections of $5 seats. and the Nats don't have $5 seats because they have $300 seats.

It's supply and farkin demand!

If Kasten (mistakenly, as it turned out) didn't think he could get $300 for those seats, he wouldn't have charged it. And we'll see them readjust prices in the next year or two to better reflect the demand for seats. Although the team probably has some ultimate seat revenue goals in mind, they don't jigger around the prices to meet those, they jigger around the prices to get our fat asses in the seats.

Boz even has the answer earlier in his column:
"The Presidential and Diamond seats will get filled over time. Supply and demand will fix it. Maybe prices come down. Maybe we win and those are the hot seats," one Nats executive said. But it doesn't look good, does it? "Not now."

If the prices for the Prez' seats come down, by Boz' logic, the cheap seats will have to go up (substantially even). They wont -- at least for that reason. Kasten will charge what the market will give him. (Insert your own pocketing the revenues joke here)

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