When Megan Dunham arrived at the Norris University Center box office at 10:15 a.m. last Friday, she thought she would have no trouble buying tickets for B.J. Novak. Then she saw the line.
“I got there as soon as I possibly, humanly could,” the Weinberg freshman said. “Then all of my hopes were dashed away by a man in black emerging to say that all available tickets had been sold. I almost cried.”
But it wasn’t soon enough. The line had snaked around three walls in Norris and through the art gallery. After waiting in line for more than an hour, Dunham was one of the many students who did not get the tickets.
Longer lines and faster ticket sell-outs have become more common as NU student organizations bring in bigger names to perform on campus. This quarter Girl Talk and B.J. Novak have attracted large crowds to the box office.
Girl Talk tickets sold out in two and a half hours. B.J. Novak tickets – sold for $5 apiece – were gone before an hour had passed.
According to Frank Zambrano, the cash operations manager for the box office, the chosen venue for the show and the number of tickets the student organization decides to keep for its members determines how many tickets are sold.
For the Novak event, each student could purchase a total of eight tickets using two WildCARDs. Zambrano said this might also have had an effect on how fast the tickets sold.
It has been A&O Production’s policy to let students bring two WildCARDs and purchase a total of eight tickets. For hot sellers such as Girl Talk, A&O decreased sales so that a student could bring two WildCARDs and purchase two tickets per card.
For the B.J. Novak show, however, A&O underestimated the popularity of the event, said SESP senior Alex White, chairman of A&O.
“We didn’t expect a sell-out in the first day, let alone the first hour,” White said.
Although Dunham admitted she would have bought eight tickets if she could, she thought A&O’s two WildCARD rule was not fair for everyone waiting in line, she said.
“People were passing WildCARDs back and forth so they could use them multiple times,” Dunham said. “The girl behind me gave her WildCARD to someone ahead of us in line so she could buy eight tickets and then give some to her.”
But passing WildCARDs forward in line wasn’t the only foul play on Friday. White worries that some students bought additional tickets to sell for higher prices.
“A&O hates that people are paying several times face value because of scalping,” White said. “It’s ripping off fellow students.”
Weinberg sophomore Kristy Doukas arrived at the box office at 10 a.m., just fifteen minutes before Dunham, but in time to purchase one of the 602 tickets. She got a few extra tickets for her friends.
“It was nice for people who couldn’t make it,” Doukas said.
For future productions, such as an upcoming event March 6, A&O plans on changing the policy of how many tickets each student can buy without raising ticket prices.
“We want to get the campus excited and energized in the middle of what’s normally a long and boring winter,” White said. “We were thinking of moving the venue but other venues are full the night of the show.”
While the lucky 602 are getting geared up to see the show on Feb. 16th in Ryan Family Auditorium, students like Dunham who missed out will have to be satisfied with “The Office” reruns.
“I’m crushed there are no new episodes recently,” Dunham said. “I would have been getting my fix by seeing B.J. Novak.”
