I now know where to find the homeless who were routed from the United Center area during the Democratic National Convention–they’re at Ticketmaster outlets in the suburbs.
On Sept. 28 I went to an Evanston Ticketmaster location hoping for a remote shot at a set of Bulls tickets so I could take my 8-year-old son to a game. Imagine my surprise at finding about 100 homeless people milling around a usually empty parking lot.
After about 15 minutes, a moving van pulled up, and the driver got out, opened the rear of the truck, and another 50 or so homeless people streamed out. It became apparent that ticket brokers had been spending the early hours rounding up the homeless with a promise of a $20 bill to stand in line and buy tickets for the brokers to sell at five or six times face value.
The brokers were despicable. They intimidated the few other people like me, who were there trying to buy tickets for our kids, by telling the 150 or so homeless that we were taking their places in line–even though it supposedly didn’t matter where you were in line to get a “lottery ticket” for Bulls tickets.
A restless crowd of 150 angry people who didn’t have a clue about why they were at a Ticketmaster outlet is not a particularly pleasant situation; the brokers, however, kept egging them on, hoping the rest of us would be scared enough to leave, thereby increasing the brokers’ odds of getting first crack at tickets.
Once the police turned up and saw what was going on, the brokers cleared out (with hundreds of tickets in hand), leaving a crowd of stranded homeless people who didn’t have a clue why they were where they were.
For the Bulls, Ticketmaster and everyone involved in ticket sales to condone this miserable situation is disappointing to say the least. I hope Chicago-area Bulls fans will think twice before patronizing ticket brokers who are making sky-high profits by exploiting the homeless and intimidating the rest of us.
