June 11, 2010

Jets slashing PSL prices to avoid blackouts

Hey, everybody, remember when New York Jets owner Woody Johnson insisted he wouldn't need to cut PSL prices in order to sell out home games this year, despite reports that more than 10,000 seats remained unsold? Well, that pretense came to a crashing end today:

The New York Jets are reducing the prices of about 18,000 personal seat licenses, including around 9,000 of which are unsold, by up to 50 percent beginning Friday in an effort to sell out the new Meadowlands Stadium by opening week. ...

[Jets VP Matt] Higgins said the team was sending an e-mail Friday to alert fans of the reduced prices in the $1.6 billion stadium. Lower end-zone seats will be dropped from $5,000 to $2,500, as will those in the mezzanine end zone. Seats in the lower-sideline section will be cut from $15,000 to $10,000.

Higgins added that fans who've already paid the higher prices for seats in those sections will receive rebates — something that will certainly avoid the fan outrage that otherwise would have resulted, but that could end up costing the team tens of millions of dollars.

In the end, though, the Jets wind up right where they would have if they'd priced the PSLs at the lower price point to begin with, except they can now be confident that they've explored the market and found that they can't go higher — and get to look like good guys with fans for lowering prices from exorbitant to merely outrageous to boot. Behavioral economics is a funny thing.