OPINION

He thought he had a ticket to ride

Say you've got a ticket to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers next Sunday. (Yay!) But you realize you can't go because on Saturday your old college roommate is getting married in Santa Barbara. (Still yay! Santa Barbara's nice.)

This isn't a dilemma; you have options, some of them happy. You can hang onto the ticket and eat the cost. If you want to frame it as a keepsake or use it as a bookmark or throw it away, that's your choice. Maybe it's a shame no one gets to use the ticket, but them's the breaks. If you want to set the ticket on fire or pay for Elon Musk or someone to blast the ticket into space, you can do that. Or maybe you give your ticket to the biggest Tom Petty fan you know who couldn't afford to go to the concert. That would be a nice gesture, wouldn't it? I bet you've done things like that in the past. Because you're not a monster.

On the other hand, you could sell your ticket. Maybe it cost more than you want to write off. So you put a note up on the bulletin board, offering the ticket for face value to the first co-worker who walks over to your desk with straight cash. Or maybe you call around to your friends, offering them the ticket. You're operating within the bounds of common decency here.

Or maybe you recognize some people are willing to pay more than face value. So you advertise that you have a ticket and are entertaining offers for it. Or you set a price somewhat above what the ticket cost and sell it to someone who meets your price. Some people would call this scalping, and there are some places where it is frowned upon, but this is simple capitalism.

While there may be a problem with tickets being snapped up by brokers to be sold at marked-up prices on the secondary market, most of us would accept that you have a right to try to make a little money off the deal. After all, going to a concert is a purely discretionary activity. You're not profiteering off something people really need like food or drugs.

But what if you promise to sell the ticket to someone and a few minutes later another person comes along and offers you more, so you sell the ticket to them instead?

At this point, some people would see your behavior as problematic. You made a promise--or entered into a contract--and then broke it. Most of us would say you shouldn't do this.

Unless maybe you told the first prospective buyer that the sale was contingent on your receiving his payment. The contract wasn't complete until you received the cash. Then you'd be free to solicit offers until the buyer showed up. And even if you didn't explicitly state this, maybe you could argue that the customer should have known this is how you do business. That might not be a nice way to operate, but it might be legal.

Anyway, it doesn't take a whole lot to complicate what initially seemed like a pretty straightforward deal. We could keep adding facts and wrinkles to this little case. That's why so many lawyers are gainfully employed.

But what if the buyer shows up and hands you his money. And you hand him your ticket. And as he's walking away, your brother-in-law shows up and says, "Dude, I really need to get a ticket to that Tom Petty show."

So you run after the buyer and ask him to return the ticket. Maybe you offer him some consideration--maybe you say you'll buy him a ticket for a future Tom Petty show; maybe you sweeten the pot by offering him your lightly used CD of Tom Petty's greatest hits.

At this point, most of us would probably say that it's up to the buyer whether he wants to accept your offer. Most of us would say the Tom Petty ticket now belongs to him and he's entitled to keep the ticket or sell it for whatever he can get on the market. Just as you were when you were the ticket's owner.

I don't think too many people would think it was OK if you called the police and instructed them to take the ticket from the buyer. I don't think many people would think it was OK if the police forcibly separated the ticket from the buyer and roughed him up a little bit in the process.

An airplane ticket is not a concert ticket, but how is it different? I can think of a lot of reasons for someone being ejected from a concert. I can think of a lot of reasons for being ejected from an airplane. There are things you can't do in both places. And the man United Airlines threw off the plane did none of them.

He wasn't thrown off for not complying with the orders of the flight crew. He was thrown off the plane for holding a ticket that the airline wanted back. Because they miscalculated, because they sold more tickets than they should have.

I know there's a lot of fine print involved that we're assumed to have agreed to when we buy a ticket. They can keep you from boarding for any reason they can make up. But they didn't prevent this passenger from boarding--they threw him off the plane.

I don't care about the fine legal points so much. I care about common decency. The man had a ticket. It was up to the airline to make it worth his while to give it up. And if he didn't want to give it up, he didn't have to.

Some of you want to fight about this. Some of you want to impugn the passenger's character. Some of you want to talk about how difficult it is for airline flight crews. Boody hoo hoo.

All you free-market capitalists defending United Airlines need to understand it could have solved this problem by paying market value for the tickets it suddenly needed to buy back. But it didn't want to do that, so called in the cops, who took untoward glee in removing a citizen from a place he had every right to be.

It's not hard to understand. It's not a gray area. This is bullying. This needs to stop.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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MovieStyle on 04/16/2017

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