Two things you can count on when it comes to early May in Wisconsin: unpredictable weather and long lines for Great Taste of the Midwest tickets.
Two things you can count on when it comes to mid-August in Wisconsin: muggy heat and Great Taste frenzy. The frenzy can manifest a number of symptoms, from “Repetitive F5 on the Pre-Party Website Stress Disorder” to “Obsessive Calendar Counting” to “Habitual Pretzel Necklace Threading.” The most tragic of all Great Taste frenzy disorders, however, is “Antisocial Extra Ticket Personality Disorder.”
I’ve talked about the laid-back nature of the Midwestern beer scene before. The best part about even the craziest of crazy beer events here is that the jerk factor is just so much lower than you see, hear and read about it being elsewhere. It’s probably our shared defensiveness about being Midwesterners, the oft-belittled smallfolk of the middle, that causes us to be aggressively nice. That may just be me, though.
Let’s get one thing clear, though: I don’t begrudge anyone their right to have an extra Great Taste ticket, and to resell it. In fact, it’s the smart move. You get only that one day in May to buy tickets in-person, and you never know if a friend is going to end up planning an impromptu August visit. Be prepared, better safe than sorry, that kind of thing.
It’s the next level of the process that gets dicey. I’m so glad that I don’t see immediate flipping of Great Taste tickets in the days that follow the sale date, but when it comes to the first week in August, and the need for one more ticket tends to become more acute, more desperate, the Antisocial Extra Ticket Personality Disorder starts to express itself.
Because, you see, it would be very easy for the Great Taste ticket secondary market to get truly and utterly absurd. It is, after all, arguably the greatest beer festival in the United States, and tickets are aggressively analog. A heartless entrepreneur class in Madison could really rake it in, if that was what the secondary market demanded.
Except it doesn’t demand that kind of free-market brutality, and that’s the beauty. Plenty of people sell their tickets for face value, no arguing, no haggling. Others leave it to best offer, which is fine, I suppose, except you’re allowing people to let their beer panic drive their offers skyward. In truth, there are still people selling spare tickets at Olin Park, on the day of the event, even then still for face value.
One of my favorite social media events of the year is the annual Shaming of the Bad Beer Citizen by the Great Taste Twitter account. There are tickets right now on Craigslist Madison that are posted for $90 and $100 each. It’s even worse on eBay, with asking prices in the $95-$125 range. That’s a substantial markup. There was even one ad on Craigslist Cedar Rapids pitching $300 for two. (That ad has since been deleted, no doubt thanks in part to the Shaming.)
The Shaming is real, too, not just a Twitter phenomenon. Sellers of overmarket Great Taste tickets hear it from potential buyers on Craigslist. Says one seller:
“Lest you get all cranky about me asking above face value, keep in mind I sat in the cool, misty/rainy Sunday morning for over 5 hours to acquire this ticket, so you're barely paying me over minimum wage for my time. Sorry, not sorry.”
I’m sorry, Sorry Not Sorry Guy — and I’m just assuming this is a guy because of course it’s a guy — but this is bad beer citizenship. If you bought two, and don’t need one, you still have your one ticket, and you’ll be reaping all kinds of beery benefits from it this Saturday. If you had to, for some sad reason, sell both of your tickets, does it really feel good to ask someone to pay even more to use something that won’t get used otherwise, just because you can?
Sure, there’s no huge difference between reselling Great Taste tickets for greater than face value, and doing the same with a football game ticket or a concert ticket, and those transactions happen all the time. But all the same, there is a pretty big difference. This is Great Taste of the Midwest; that last word is key, and we do things different around here. Sixty bucks and a smile, my man.
