From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification.<p>You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anymore.<p>Apparently they've been making exceptions for him in years past where he was able to pay hundreds of dollars to have them custom printed for him. And this year they've decided to no longer provide that exception.<p>Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.<p>If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.<p><a href="https://www.aol.com/articles/81-old-lifelong-dodgers-fan-012606057.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.aol.com/articles/81-old-lifelong-dodgers-fan-012...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Dodgers/comments/1s5fkni/la_dodgers_tell_82yearold_50year_season_ticket/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Dodgers/comments/1s5fkni/la_dodgers...</a>
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.<p>Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone. Maybe he has dexterity issues that make using a smartphone difficult. Maybe he doesn't want to install their invasive app. Maybe he finds that paper tickets are easier to manage. Maybe he recognizes that the vendor made this change to benefit themselves at the expense of the fans, as it allows them greater control of the resale market.<p>I own a smartphone but prefer paper tickets. Luckily I can (and do) still get them at my team's stadium, although I have to pick them up in person.
He shouldn't even need a reason. "I don't want a smartphone" should be sufficient and should not lock one out of commerce, events, and other cultural experiences.<p>In 50 years, everyone's going to have an advertisement-injecting brain implant, and stores are going to require you to have one in order to purchase anything, and they'll lock you out of commerce as a filthy Luddite if you don't get one. And, 50 years from now, commenters on HN will defend those businesses because the implant is "modern" and supporting those ancient smartphones and credit cards is hard to do.
He can get a smartphone dedicated to the ticket app if it is such a huge piece of his life/hobby
<i>> Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.</i><p>In my country right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers' mental health and education. We've got schools banning phones, and the government wanting to introduce age checks for social media. Infinite doomscrolling in your pocket, endless brainrot short-form videos, it's not healthy and we need to get smartphones out of the hands of the young.<p>So there are good reasons people might choose not to get a smartphone.<p>Then <i>exactly the same government</i> also proposed people wouldn't be allowed to work without a 'Digital ID Card' - making smartphones (and google/apple accounts) mandatory.
I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law, but I really wish they would pass a law requiring supporting people without smartphone apps. Obviously there would be some exceptions where justified, even for things other than “the app is the whole point” and those need to be thought through, but in this case and plenty of others, there’s just no reason they can’t accommodate non app users. “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.
> “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.<p>For sure. If that was true the answer would be "charge the non-app users a nominal fee to cover the cost".<p>Invasive tracking is the point, not the cost. It's anti-consumer.
The law that he can invoke in a weaponized way is the ADA.<p>It’s vague enough about what a disability is, that something like “my hand tremor and farsightedness preclude using a touchscreen, I request a reasonable accommodation” is a valid request. If they deny admission and accommodation to somebody incapable of using a smartphone, there is a whole army of lawyers that will gladly take the case on contingency.<p>As you note, the app is not inherent to seeing a game, or preventing resale. There’s no reason an id and confirmation number can’t be used to get him in.
There is a special ring of hell reserved for people who abuse the ADA.<p>Such abuse is an insult to everyone who needs it, everyone who engages with it in good faith, everyone who spends gobs of money to make events and services accessible to those with genuine need.<p>I don’t rule the world but if I did abusers of protective rules would be summarily executed. (Don’t vote for me. I’ve got a short but significant list of similar policies. Scammers those guys would have targets on their heads, kidnap for ransom criminals those guys too)
> “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.<p>Then why is 'I don't wanna' sufficient justification to force non-critical services to support your preferences forever?
> I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law<p>No policy or law shall be enacted that directly or indirectly requires a use of a computing device where any other alternative at all is possible. Where offering other alternatives presents a cost, that cost (and only that cost, with no markup) may be passed on to the consumer.
>Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.<p>Maybe he doesn't then get any of the benefits of having a smartphone.<p>I don't understand why we need to bend over backwards for folks who have chosen to ignore modernity. There was a woman in my neighborhood association at one point who would throw a fit about us using email for communication because "not everyone has a computer you know." This was in 2018. As a society, we've gone completely out of our way to make living on your own terms legal and doable. You don't even have to get you or your kids vaccinated if you don't want to! But then going even farther and expecting to get all the same benefits as folks who've decided to accept and use modern technology is ridiculous... the Dodgers don't owe this man physical season tickets, just like Google doesn't owe me the ability to physically mail in a search term and have the results physically mailed back to me.
Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often involved.
I'm in my 40s, there is a shit ton of modern UX I struggle with. Basically anything gesture based for example, but really a lot of apps are just shit and have no sensible UX design behind them, so you need to try to click everything and hope you don't mess something up.<p>To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.
The first time I used iOS I noticed a lot of things it considers "normal" are completely undiscoverable unless you know.<p>Swipe down from the top. No, the other top.<p>Click share, now click "find in page". Wait, that doesn't share at all?
"Share" is one of the worst inventions of all. What it does in phones is random across apps and platforms, and usually has nothing to do with what the word "share" means in any other context.
You're sharing data between apps. It's an app->app API, essentially. You can easily send an app store listing to your Reminders "Wishlist" section if you want, for example.<p>It's definitely not only social sharing.
I still despise whoever decided that swipe-from-top needs 2 versions somehow
"Buttons" that are just labels, that's on the top of my F* U list.
I don’t think people understand the scale of the issue. Each decade that goes by we welcome a new class of elderly, and each decade that goes by, we continue to write off those elderly users.<p>The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.
This is why it's so important to iteratively adapt. I'm not saying you have to catch every new version, but to go from a NES to a PlayStation 5 would be a jarring experience like going from a dumb cell phone (or landline?) to an iPhone 17.<p>I would say catch enough iterations to keep the basic premise in mind, because there is a bit of personal responsibility to maintain technological literacy in the modern age. A telephone isn't really an esoteric device, either.
At airports and drugstores, the magazine racks will usually have a "Guide to iPhone/Android" type publication with a ton of pictures that are aimed at this market. I picked one up and realized while flipping through it that there is way too much for a brand new user to be able to absorb. The gestures needed on iOS to pull up options that are otherwise invisible in the UI will be nonsensical to someone whose UI/UX frame of reference is an ATM screen or a gas pump (or self-checkout kiosk which they might not use) where every option is shown on screen without needing additional navigation. Just like the first iPhone, come to think of it.
Now have your grandparent try to teach you something you aren't interested in and don't really want to learn, and see how it goes.
No it’s often just stubbornness. My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.<p>My mom is 83, a retired school teacher and she has been using computers since 1986 and has an entire networked computer setup in her office with multiple computers and printers. She went from the original Apple //e version of AppleWorks to Office now.
> My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.<p>I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
I think the most frustrating thing is that UI's largely haven't improved in 10-15 years, yet we still get constant changes from people trying to justify their jobs or manufacture "impact".
My Dad and I have had about 7 sessions just on copy-and-paste on the computer. He kind of got it for a minute there, but didn't use it enough, so now it's gone and he's back to just re-typing everything.
The second biggest reason (after freedom to install apps) why I don't use an iphone is: for the love of God I can't use the gesture to switch windows. It used to be simple swipe up from bottom. Now you have to do an arc or something from the corner. I can never get it right.
In a case like this, you just buy the tickets for your grandfather and print them out for him.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.<p>This logic justifies buying any other unrelated product as a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets. Does this mean that the Dodgers should be able to make "owning a car" also a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets? After all, if you can afford season tickets, you should be able to afford a car payment. Maybe they should only let people in who own rolexes because, hey, a season ticket holder should be able to afford a nice watch, too.<p>I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition. There's probably an example that's not immediately coming to mind, but I don't think it was common or justified.
<i>> I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition.</i><p>Then you must not have been around pre-smartphone? Those of us who were will remember having to buy either banknotes or checks. Later, some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy. If you weren't willing to buy any of those things there was little chance of a deal taking place. Showing up with your goat to offer in exchange would get you laughed out of the room, even though there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Realistically, the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment if that is what's on the table, but, as I am sure you can imagine, it isn't worth the effort for those who have the luxury of choice. Where technology makes a seller's life simpler, they will demand it. Why wouldn't they?
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.<p>I don't agree that it's better. Why should I have to worry about my ticket running out of battery power or being such a high-value pickpocket target once I'm already in the venue?<p>The latter is a huge issue at music festivals for example:<p>- <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/OutsideLands/search/?q=phone+stolen&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on&sort=new" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/OutsideLands/search/?q=phone+stolen...</a><p>- <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/electricdaisycarnival/search/?q=phone+stolen&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on&sort=new" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/electricdaisycarnival/search/?q=pho...</a><p>- <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/coachella/search/?q=phone+stolen&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on&sort=new" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/coachella/search/?q=phone+stolen&in...</a><p>Can't just leave it at home if you need it to get in to the thing.
They caught organized outside groups stealing phones from people at these events: <a href="https://abc7chicago.com/post/lollapalooza-stolen-cell-phones-2023-chicago-police-department/13662910/" rel="nofollow">https://abc7chicago.com/post/lollapalooza-stolen-cell-phones...</a>
I'm not a fan of the "something better" phrasing myself. It's very much anti-systems-thinking.<p>Engineers should be honest that everything is a tradeoff. For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets, you impose additional failure modes, dependency chains, and accessibility issues that simply weren't a problem with paper ticketing.<p>The "phone-ification" of everything will probably bite us in the behind in the future, just like the buildout of out car-centric environments does now.
>For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets<p>Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)
> I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster.<p>Case in point: I traveled from St. Louis to Houston for a concert a few years ago. Before I left home to catch my flight, I installed the Ticketmaster app on a phone and verified that I could bring up the tickets. When I tried it again in my hotel an hour before the conference, it no longer worked because the fraud detection in their app was apparently confused as to why I was now in Houston.<p>Fixing this took 45 minutes on hold to get a support agent and a frantic call to my wife so she could check the disused email address I used to sign up for Ticketmaster 20 years earlier and get the verification code they sent.<p>There are a lot of reasons to dislike digital tickets, but this is one of them. I used to go to dozens of concerts every year. Now it's such a hassle that I don't bother unless it's small venue that doesn't play these games.
That's fucking nightmarish. That's exactly the kind of scenario I'd think up and be told is "science fiction" by the kind of apologists who think forced usage of technology is okay.<p>We attended a once-in-a-lifetime show last fall (a performer who is aging and likely won't tour again) a two hour drive away. I wouldn't install the Ticketmaster app and played an old man "character" with the box office to get them to print my tickets and hold them at will call. I played the "we are driving in from out of town" card, etc, and they accommodated me.<p>I tried that with a closer venue a couple of months ago and got told, in no uncertain terms, "no app no admittance". I knuckled-under and loaded the app on my wife's iPhone (which she insists on keeping because Stockholm syndrome, I assume). I feel bad that I gave in (because it makes me part of the problem). I really wanted to see the show and I wasn't willing to forego it on principle. (Kinda embarrassing, actually.)
This is how I feel with the places that want to lock up your phone. There are safety considerations in that. But we're just astrotrufed into the "well this is better" PR campaigns from yondr.
In most cases, digital event tickets are a QR code which is just an alphanumerical code. You can easily print them, so you don't have to worry about your phone.<p>I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.
There's an amusement park we like to go to. We get season passes, which normally means renewing the small plastic card we got the first year. They've switched to app only this year, with the option of getting a card, if for some reason you cannot or will not use the app. I believe there's a small fee for issuing the card.<p>I believe their reasoning is much the same. They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.<p>Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable. There are other methods. Especially if you're only issuing paper tickets as an alternative, e.g. yes we will sell you a paper version, but understand that it is absolutely non-transferable and non-refundable.<p>Some people might not want to bring a phone to these types of events and venues, which I can completely understand, neither do I, but I can live with it. The thing that bugs me is the lack of an alternative, which isn't really that expensive and which most won't even use. Because to some, the app really don't provide value and in those cases they solely exists for the benefit of one company. If you're paying the price of season passes to pretty much anything these days, I think you're entitled to some small level of personalized service and customization.
> <i>Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable.</i><p>That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to <i>all</i> the games, so they want you to be able to give <i>some</i> tickets to friends, etc.<p>They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost <i>exclusively</i> resell tickets to individual games.<p>So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?
But you can do that the same way you do with the app. The does this by tying you ticket to your season pass, and to you. If you want to give the ticket to someone else, call the ticket office, ask them to re-register the ticket to your friend. If the ticket office notices that X number of tickets tied to that season pass has been re-registered, just refuse, or better, have the system refuse.<p>Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
>They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.<p>Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.
Generating badges has loopholes. (Trust me I’ve used them). And IDing every person can be a mission on itself. Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.
>Generating badges has loopholes.<p>This seems to be an area where people will always find loopholes. Should this be a race-to-the-bottom in an attempt to make the most foolproof system possible, or do we at some point accept that maybe there's never going to be a perfect way to do this?<p>>And IDing every person can be a mission on itself.<p>I've worked the door at venues of various sizes, so it's not like I suggested this from ignorance. What we're talking about doesn't need to be "every person", just a specific set of ticketholders.<p>>Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.<p>I know I'm just me, speaking for me, and am a sample size of 1 that doesn't look like the general population in this regard, but there's no "with or without my consent" if I decide to opt out of going to games entirely. It'll be a cold day in hell before I give someone my biometrics just so I can watch someone try and hit a ball.
For sure you <i>can</i> ID everyone. Nightclubs, music festivals and even airports do this sort of thing all the time.<p>You just need good organisation, plenty of security stations, and an atmosphere that rewards people who arrive early - checking a stadium's worth of IDs over the course of 2-3 hours rather than over the course of 20 minutes.<p>What you can't do is charge $20 for a glass of beer then expect people to arrive 2-3 hours before the game starts.
They already do! See Madison Square Garden [0] and The Intuit Dome [1]!<p>[0] <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition-technology-madison-square-garden-law-new-york" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://stadiumtechreport.com/feature/intuit-dome-leaning-on-facial-authentication-for-ticketing-and-concession-transactions/" rel="nofollow">https://stadiumtechreport.com/feature/intuit-dome-leaning-on...</a>
And that will slow it down for everyone. Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state
It could slow it down for everyone, or just the season passholders. If it does, oh well - there are worse things than taking an extra 10-15 minutes to get into a stadium.<p>>Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state.<p>Pretty sure, given the comments in this very thread, that HN collectively understands there's more surveillance happening on your phone than with another person making sure the name on your ID matches the name on your ticket, or that your badge photo matches your face.
They can buy their tickets at the door so they don't have to show an ID.
They could force you to re-sell your tickets through the team MLB site, and to sell them for face value.<p>If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.<p>This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.<p>They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
The last time I had a season pass to something, they printed me the equivalent of an employee id badge with my face and name printed on it. The badge <i>was</i> the ticket. How do you resell an individual ticket?
It's pretty common for people who rely on networking to have season passes and hand out various games as "gifts" to whoever they want to get on the good side of.
Nothing about this requires an app. Just an ID.<p>Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
>They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.<p>This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.
The ticket is for “two days of resources that you personally can use”, not “two days of resources that can be used by any number of ticket-holders.”<p>It’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.
Being advocate of the devil here.<p>Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.<p>It is completely unreasonable, but for a different reason. This is not technology A (paper ticket) vs tecnhology B (phone).<p>It is about open vs. proprietary. Paper is paper, it does not forcefully tie the user to anything. A phone is a requirement to be forced to do business with one of only two megacorporations, for something completely unrelated. He wants to buy a game ticket, not a phone.<p>Imagine you want to buy a sandwich but are told you must first buy an earring, completely unrelated and not something you want.
It does seem pretty unreasonable to me. He’s an 81yo life long dodgers fan. You make exceptions like you’ve always done. It’s what makes human, and sets us apart from computers.<p>Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.
> you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.<p>It’s hard to argue that having to manage a smartphone and its ever-changing apps and UI flows for purchasing and handling tickets, is simpler than buying a paper ticket with paper money. Is it really better?
I don’t think this policy would pass muster under the ADA though.<p>The guy might not be sufficiently disabled to qualify - but for example if you have a blind person without a smartphone, you can’t tell them they’re out of luck - because you can clearly reasonably accommodate them without causing “undue financial hardship” by giving them tickets at will-call.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a blind person / person with low vision without a smartphone these days: they’re a near-essential window into services that aren’t accessible though plain paper.
> “undue financial hardship”<p>If they have already moved away from paper tickets for everyone else, now there is financial hardship, not to mention the loss to the team's economic position from scalping. Also smartphones have supported usage by the blind for years, particularly on iOS.
Visually impaired people use smartphones too. If the app isn't supporting the accessibility features of the platform, it should still be held liable under the ADA.<p>(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)<p>But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.
Visual impairment was just my naive example - but maybe there’s a better one that still persists.<p>Regardless, maybe there’s a path to legislation forbidding smartphone requirements for huge monopoly businesses like national professional sports leagues. I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
Yes because we really need to give the government more power to selectively go after businesses - what could possibly go wrong?
<i>> I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.</i><p>What is your reasoning for that sentiment? (I don't disagree)
Smart phones have had plenty of affordances for blind people. But they didn’t say he was blind or unable to use a smart phone
For that matter, he could/should look into filing an ADA complaint all the same.
Many stadiums make it near impossible to buy paper tickets. Even then they start arguing with you to prevent you from doing that.<p>> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.<p>If you have money for a tea or coffee, you have money to send to me. Just because someone may have the means to buy something doesn't mean they they should be excluded from participating in cultural events for not purchasing and maintaining that particular thing. (Citizens often times over subsidize the stadiums in which the team is based in)<p>I think it's the golden state warriors that forces you to give them your biometrics to enter the stadium.
IMO, the right thing to do is grandfather in any existing season ticket holders, if they ask. Have them go to a specific entrance where someone can check an ID and mark them off a list. Simple job for an intern or whatever.
This is a strong disagree from me. What this is implying is that the customer now has to buy into two ecosystems: the expensive, Dodgers, tickets, and stadium world; and the far more perilous, casino in your pocket, attention sucking, hell, that's smartphones. Countless articles are being written on the effect of smartphones on the elderly (and teens). But you know what? Fuck'em. Because progress.<p>Another comment suggested grandfathering in customers like this. Sure, that's one idea. But generally, don't punish the masses because of the crimes of the few.<p>I'm certain VIPs don't scan their phones when they come to the game. This man is nothing short of a VIP.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.<p>No, this has not changed for the entire time physical tickets haxe existed. What has changed is the level of greed practiced by that industry.
How old are you? Some day you are going to get old and you won’t like that train of thinking.
This is probably the most heartless thing I have read all day. I worry about the future of the world if this is the norm
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.<p>As long as the technologies you move to are equally freedom- and privacy-respecting. If I have to use a non-free spyware app to buy your tickets I'm not buying. Now, if you let me pay for and download a PKPASS that I can use on my fully-libre GrapheneOS smartphone then sure.
Having to own anything beyond the money to buy something to buy something, is, in fact, unreasonable.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.<p>Perhaps. But in this case, they've moved to something worse. Digital tickets have their benefits, but paper tickets are still superior because they don't tie you into big tech relationships and don't require supporting infrastructure to work.
Soooo money is worthless now? … because tech?
>Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.<p>I've gone entire years at work where no one ever mentions baseball or MLB. It is a dead sport. The NBA? Sure. NFL? It's practically an official US holiday. So if they want to chase off an octogenarian fan who will buy their season tickets because they demand he get a smart phone that he doesn't want to learn to use and wouldn't use anyway... why not? They've signed their own death certificate with that. This is firmly in "Please drink a verification can" territory, and I have no idea why anyone would be apologizing for them.
<i>> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.</i><p>Right, but he is wanting to choose the season pass over the smartphone. If he buys a smartphone then he won't have the money for a season pass anymore. It turns out you only get to spend <i>x</i> units of currency once.
I agree, this is a good way to stop scalping and reduce costs by not having to print physical tickets. It's interesting to see the negative sentiment here given other threads about scalping overwhelmingly suggest we <i>need</i> government regulation to stop it. Well, here's a private solution to that problem but apparently that's also bad and requires threats of government action via the ADA... incredible.
Nothing's perfect. Some ideas to fight against things we don't like will come up, and then we'll see the collateral and go, "Oh, maybe that's actually not the best way to do it". That's okay! That's the way life goes! It's not "incredible" or hypocritical or whatever else you're trying to imply. What you're seeing is merely folk working through things.<p>Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.<p>This misses the point.<p>The question is: why would a smartphone be required, to watch a local game?
It is not required to watch a game. At least not unless you are not using it as some kind of vision aid — although even then there are likely reasonable alternatives.<p>It is required to satisfy the desires of a vendor wanting to sell something. They make a smartphone a part of satisfying their desires because it makes their life a whole lot simpler. Same reason they won't give you season tickets in exchange for 12,000 bushels of wheat. They <i>could</i>, but why would they? If you don't want to play ball, so to speak, they are happy to sell their product to someone else who will.
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.<p>The problem is, in the end it leads to a society where you NEED a smartphone to enjoy basic human existence - and yes, access to cultural and sports events is a fundamental part of being a human.<p>That in turn almost always means: your smartphone must be either Apple or a blessed Google device. And that in turn means: no rooting (because most apps employ anti-root SDKs these days), no cheap AOSP phones, no AOSP forks like Graphene OS. And that is, frankly, dystopian when your existence as a human being depends on one of two far too rich American mega corporations. Oh and it needs to be a recent model too, because app developers just love to go the easy route and only support recent devices on recent OS versions.<p>And that's before we get into account bans (which particularly Google is infamous for), international sanctions like the one against the ICC justices, or pervasive 24/7 surveillance by advertising SDKs or operating systems themselves.