The Public

Sometimes I wonder why I enjoy my music retail job as much as I do. There seems to be so much abuse in the field, abuse heaped onto employees by the general public.



Ticketmaster is the cause of a lot of the "stress" of the job. Ever since we became an outlet about a year and a half ago it has been a pain.



As a Ticketmaster outlet, we can sell tickets to any Ticketmaster venue in our "region". The region is basically any venue south of Nashville and east of Memphis. This means I can sell tickets to Atlanta, to Orlando, to Jackson, MS, but NOT to Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis or Detroit. I simply do not have the "permissions" necessary to sell to venues outside of our region.



Yesterday a couple came in to purchase tickets to a show in Detroit. They were told we could not do that, Detroit is out of our region. This upset them greatly. The man basically told my assistant that she was "lying" because three months ago he "bought tickets to a Detroit show in here". She restated that we are not able to sell tickets to shows outside our region and proceeded to call Ticketmaster to verify. (We have a Ticketmaster hotline to call to ask questions like these...we will usually default to it to pacify problem customers who just don't understand. We will exhaust every resource so that they know we did our best to serve them.) This did not please the couple because they were convinced that the reason that they couldn't get tickets was because my assistant didn't know what she was doing. They were also mistaken that they had ever purchased tickets for Detroit through us, it's impossible. The woman said to the man "let's come back later when this stupid _itch isn't here, she doesn't know what she's doing."



The customer is always right, eh?



Bunk.