Love letters to corporations episode #6

My dearest ticketek,

I am writing today to commend you on your excellent and innovate business model of charging for delivery of etickets, a service which, by my mathematical reckoning, costs you precisely $0.000000000 dollars. I had once believed that your email delivery prices of $4-5 would be the absolute zenith of your entrepreneurial courage. But lo! I was mistaken. Please accept my most humble apologies for doubting the ambitious heights of your brave and fearless profiteering, for I have recently learned that you charged $7.60 for delivery of etickets to Jack White’s recent Sydney performance.

“I’m going to Australia! / A seven dollar ticket fee won’t hold them back…”

This is a profit earning venture of the highest and most laudable courage. I can only imagine that upon hearing this news drug kingpins, such as the Wire’s Avon Barksdale, leaned back in their comfy leather chairs and proclaimed:

“Goddamn dawg, we in the wrong motherf**king business up in here. We shootin’ fools and getting sprayed wit bullets to get that green and those dudes up in ticketek just be kicking back in airconditioning getting mad cash thrown at ’em by charging delivery for ETICKETS? Etickets don’t cost no money to deliver! Don’t those Aussie punters be knowing dat? I wanna deliver a K of blow, I gotta pay my drivers, my security, my dealers, gotta pay the Five-0 ta look the other way, that sh*t costs money yo! I gotta factor that into the cost of my product. You ain’t gotta do that to send a goddamn email! Dem Aussies got ta get a rudimentary understanding of the inherent dangers of allowing a monopolised system to exploit its users, yo.”

Recently, I released my second novel, which retails for $17.95 RRP. I decided that for copies sold via my website I would incorporate the $3 packaging and posting cost into a $19.95 bundle so that it could come in at slightly less than a $20 note, or the cost of ten packs of tim-tams (units of tim tams are how I calculate the vast majority of my financial transactions, much to the chagrin of my accountant.)

  +       =        OR    x 10                             

I realise now that this is insane. I mean, by way of contrast, for you to send 1 000 tickets would cost you $0 and earn $7 600, whereas to ship 1 000 of my books would cost $3 000 and earn me $ 3000 thus making a profit of zero. Inspired by your daylight robbery entrepreneurial spirit , I have some suggestions for further business innovations:

1 Have you thought of charging your customers for the air that they will be breathing at the event? Clearly some people may be unhappy about this, but of course, they are always welcome to bring their own oxygen tanks!

2 How about charging the punters each time they go to the bathroom OR even better, a per minute fee? This would have the extra benefit of discouraging girls from spending hours in the bathroom discussing theoretical physics (I assume that’s why they spend so goddamn long in there?)

“So anyway, then I was all like, OMFG, if you can’t coalesce with me on Schrodinger’s Cat then we are NEVER going to see eye to eye on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox!  It’s totes OVER!”

3 Finally, what about charging a small fee to people walking past your venues and overhearing your events? I mean, those parasitical bastards are benefitting from your entertainment events and paying nothing!

Thanks for your time and keep up the great work.

Swarm Regards,

J. M. Donellan

PS I have charged you $7.60 to receive this email. My invoice is attached. Payment is due within 7 days.