StubHub Goes Brick And Mortar

NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — No longer just a web-presence, secondary ticket vendor StubHub has branched out into the physical world by opening a storefront in New York City on 40th Street near Broadway.

The shop, which exists primarily to provide a pickup point for event tickets purchased on line seems to have produced little more than a weary shrug from venue staff.

"My attitude is: That’s life," Paul Libin, the producing director of Jujamcyn Theaters told the New York Times "There’s nothing I can do about it."

The store, which reportedly has the ambiance of a car rental outlet is a first for New York, only recently made possible by recent changes to the laws which limited the markup allowed on secondary market tickets. A similar outlet has also been opened in Chicago. StubHub has a ticket blackout for three days before an event, in order to allow time for tickets to arrive via mail. The storefront changes this dynamic, allowing tickets to be purchased within a matter of hours through terminals available to customers.

The storefront hearkens back to the days when real estate in Manhattan wasn't outrageously high and ticket vendors would open up shop right next to big shows. The law limited the vendors to a certain markup but it rarely stopped the vendors from selling tickets for much inflated prices. "f he was honest," recalled Phil Smith, Schubert Pres. to the New York Times, "he’d be out of business in a week."

Secondary ticket sales are a hot button item of late, with high-profile ticketing fiascoes like Miley Cyrus making national headlines. The apparent deregulation of the ticket market has led to egregious examples of sky-high event tickets being made available quickly after being snapped up by speculators. According to the NYT, eBay, which owns StubHub, contends that about 40% of event tickets sold on the site are sold at or below face value yet this doesn't seem to entirely ameliorate the tragedy of the commons occurring with higher profile events. – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers