There was a time this summer when I acted in a pretty opportunistic way. My girlfriend, five of my other friends, and myself went to go see Jason Aldean and Florida Georgia Line, both country bands, this summer at Tinley Park Amphitheater in Chicago. If you don't know anything about Tinley Park there is a stage, then maybe 30 rows of seating, and then behind that is a huge hill full of first come-first serve basis. Well anyways, we had all bought lawn tickets for a pretty cheap price, and decided to go and have a good time, All of my friends are 21, so in the parking lot before the game they had quite a few drinks. I was the "designated driver" and didn't have any but was still planning on having a good time seeing some of my favorite bands in concert.
The concert was absolutely packed, but my friends refused to hurry along in the parking lot so we got some pretty low quality seats very high up in the stands. They didn't really care because they were going to have a good time no matter what, but I was kind of upset because I purposely got there early so that we could get good seats, and we still managed to make it happen. Well after the opening band played my girlfriend and I had to use the bathroom. The bathrooms at Tinley Park are a disaster and the lines are usually like 30 minutes long and it gets kind of rowdy. While I was in line I met a guy who was doing undercover security at the venue. We had a nice talk and at right before we got to the bathroom he told me to grab my girlfriend when she was done and he could get us down into "the pit" right in front of the stage.
He told us that he could only get us to into the pit so I had to make the decision between going back and hanging out with my friends or ditch them for a little bit for an opportunity for a once in a lifetime concert experience. I decided since they were already drunk enough and were the reason that we had such crappy seats to begin with, I was going to follow this guy to get down into the pit. We got in and it was one of the best experiences of my life. After the concert,we were able to find our friends again. It took a long time and we were some of the last people out of there because there is literally zero cell reception at the concert venue, but I was happy to have found them. We explained why we had disappeared and they were not too happy but it the end of the day it was pretty clear they were just jealous.
I made a selfish decision to ditch the people I went to the concert with, but I felt like I made the right decision. Also the concert venue lost money because I paid far less for my ticket than the other people in the pit who actually had to buy those tickets at full price. It was a great time though, and was one of the best nights of my life. If faced with the decision again i would definitely do the same.
In future posts please put in a line space between paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteAlso, let me point out that this is the type of post for which having an alias is invaluable. You shouldn't write this sort of thing for public viewing with your real name attached.
For our class, it is okay on content except that it went against the prompt, which was to give an example where you had the chance to act opportunistically, but didn't. Here you did. I don't blame you under the circumstances. It's just that this post sheds no light at all on the economics we are studying.
Finally, in you very last paragraph you made a claim that the concert venue lost money on you. That's probably not true at all. More likely, is that the concert was a sell out, or if not that then that pit was a sell out, even if they could have jammed more people into the place. Sometimes, even with a sell out, there are no shows. That creates idle capacity after the fact that the concert venue can't anticipate before hand. Doing what the security guard did then did not lose revenues for the place. It just made a couple of people happy by the experience.
I guess I was pretty confused while writing this post to begin with. I was having a really hard time thinking about anything I had done that was opportunistic at all, let alone something I passed up on. After class on Tuesday and listening to the discussion and hearing input from other students I now feel like I grasp the concept a lot better now. Also i guess I also didn't think that people may not have shown up, and maybe for publicity reasons or other reasons they wanted the pit to look full to show how great of a crowd it was.
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