eBay have banned the sale of tickets to Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony on eBay itself and on their ticket subsidiary, StubHub. The company had been under pressure from the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies after tickets which will not be issued until January, were selling for up to $7,500 last week. The tickets are issued to members of Congree, and are supposed to be free of charge.
Almost a quarter of a million tickets will be issued for the ceremony, which takes place in Washington on 20th January. Senator Diane Feinstein, who chairs the inauguration committee, had said that buyers would be prepared to pay up to $40,000 per ticket; she is now preparing legislation that would make re-selling them a criminal offence.
The tickets may be gone, but inauguration merchandise, from badges and periscopes to hotel rooms, is still all over eBay.
3 Responses
HMMMMMM
the land of the free and capitalism
if some one wants to pay for these tickets let them
what harm is it doing
other than some folk are are worried their not getting their slice
or more to the point Someones got the hump because they gave them away free and they could have sold them
I don’t understand why groups like these are always trying to force stuff like this off eBay. Why don’t they just sell the 1/4 million tickets on eBay themselves for up to $40,000 each? A quick calculation tells me that is $10 billion.
To put that in perspective, NASA has a budget of $17.6 billion in 2009.