Demand For Good Cubs Tickets Not What Cubs Originally Thought

Either the Cubs are unnecessarily wasting time and money trying to sell partial ticket plans or things aren't going as well in the ticket department as Wally Hayward would have previously led us to believe.  Remember when he stated that Cubs fans should rush out and buy the 13-game plans because they would never be able to otherwise score Yankees tickets? Well, that was bullshit.

The Cubs sent out an e-mail today announcing a new Six Pack ticket plan that offers fans an opportunity to buy tickets to the coveted Yankees, White Sox, or Cardinals games, provided that they also purchase five other tickets to games that aren't nearly as exciting, warm, or at a convenient time.  You know, the ones they won't sell unless they otherwise tie them to the actual tickets that people want.

It is a tried and true method that does work.  I remember working for a small retail bookstore back in the height of the Beanie Baby craze.  We were not selling much because we couldn't sell things as cheaply as Barnes & Noble and Amazon was also just getting started.  So we had a lot of overstock in general, but we also had things that nobody wanted to buy unless maybe they were on a scavenger hunt: Childrens books in the shape of creepy fruit shapes with arms and legs reaching out of the shelves as if to latch onto unsuspecting customers as they walked by ignoring them, university sweatpants in a blindingly yellow and neon blue that appeared to have been designed by an insane person, and all sorts of things with the spiritually inspirational poem, "Footprints" on it.  If you can think of an item, chances are excellent that our store had it in stock with "Footprints" imprinted on it in some way.

So at that time, Beanie Babies were selling for crazy prices on the secondary market, but Ty would only distribute to retailers that sold them at the suggested retail price of $5.  If you got caught marking them up, they stopped selling to you. So we had to be creative.  We would get a shipment of Beanie Babies in, check around to see what the secondary market was selling them for, and then package them with a whole bunch of crap that would never sell on its own for a comparable price.  It worked.  People came in, bought fifty bucks worth of crap with a Beanie Baby attached to it, and promptly tossed the crap away in the garbage can outside our store.  We would go outside, and there would be a  "Footprints" frisbee in the trash laying on top of a pop-up book about the laws in Leviticus, and next to a CD of an obscure Swedish reggae band.  But whatever, we had our money and we weren't technically selling our Beanie Babies on the secondary market.

So now the Cubs are doing the same thing.  They don't especially care that you will never use the tickets for that Tuesday afternoon game in April to see the Astros, but you bought them so you can see the Yankees play.  The unfortunate thing for the Cubs is that they had originally thought we would buy twelve lame tickets in order to see one good game, but it seems there was a slight miscalculation, and thus the Six Pack plans are born.

I'm sure Wally will be all over the radio and television telling us we better snap these up quick, or we won't have a chance to see the Cubs get pummeled by the Yankees when the single-game tickets go on sale.  Hopefully he uses different words this time, or everyone will know he's just reading the same old script.