There’s little funnier than internet rage over an innocuous word or phrase a person uses in a PR-like social media post. We’ve all seen the massive overreaction from those that don’t understand the nuance of some words and post about how they’re right and you’re wrong, and they always seem to be super-arrogant about it.
And for the Worcester Railers, that word is “sellout”.
If one were interested in doing so, they could look up the word “sellout” on dictionary.com, and out of the four definitions supplied only one matches the way the Railers and other entertainment organizations use it:
“An entertainment, as a show or athletic event, for which all the seats are sold.”
Of course, then someone would head on over to Wikipedia and check out the entry for the DCU Center, see it lists the hockey capacity of the building as 12,135, and start jumping up and down, most figuratively but certainly some literally, and reply to the posting saying that the number the Railers announced isn’t 12,135, so the game isn’t sold out!
And, they’d be 100% wrong.
As to why they’re wrong, we need to go back to the IceCats’ days, where that 12,135 number was considered a sellout. Well, technically that number isn’t correct and wasn’t ever correct, but it’s close enough to the number of seats that were available back then, so we’ll go with it.
So why did the Worcester Sharks consider 7,320 as a sellout?
The answer for the WorSharks was that’s the number of available seats with the curtaining system used on both ends. Despite the ticket demands for their franchise-opening game, the WorSharks did not raise those end curtain, saying the goal was “to create demand”. It didn’t take long for them to realize that was a dumb idea.
So while they always considered that 7,320 number as a sellout, when there was a demand for tickets they would raise the end curtains and sell what they could, and any number over 7,320 was still called a “sellout”.
Now I wasn’t a math major, but I do know that 7,320 is a lot less than 12,135. But somehow no one ever seemed to complain that the WorSharks didn’t sell out the DCU Center when they said they did.
So now that brings us to the Railers. A look at the ECHL website, if you can find the information on their terribly redesigned site, lists the capacity the Railers will use as 5,600.
That number was before the seat replacement over the past summer, and once that project was completed the available number of seats was actually under that 5,600 number. The addition of general admission standing-room tickets eventually raised that number to 5,720. But how is 5,720 a sellout when there are over 6,000 more seats that could be sold?
The answer is surprisingly simple: the Railers lease is based on those 5,720 tickets.
Now asking the Railers specific details about their lease with the DCU Center is akin to asking a spy who their contacts are. Asking Sandy Dunn, general manager of the DCU Center, will give you similar results. So figuring out the exact costs is all but impossible.
One thing the Railers readily admit is based on their lease, raising the curtains, even just one side, costs them money. They obviously won’t say how much, but when you figure the extra open sections mean more security is needed, extra people on the cleaning crew for both before and after the event, and the potential for needing more union stagehands, the costs incurred are likely significant.
So, with all that, the Railers generally only make 5,720 tickets available.
Let’s go back to that definition again. “An entertainment, as a show or athletic event, for which all the seats are sold.”
The lease is based on 5,720 attendees, and once that number is hit all the available seats are sold, so it’s a sellout. Yes, they can sell more, but only when it’s financially viable for them to do so. An educated guess says they need to sell in the neighborhood of 300 tickets to make opening the curtains to a 7,230 capacity financially viable.
The Railers know what the average number of walk-up tickets sold through the box office is, and the number purchased through Ticketmaster or by calls to the ticket office on game days. And if that number won’t get them enough tickets to make opening the curtains worth it to their bottom line, they won’t raise the curtains.
Another consideration is it’s better financially to sell more tickets for the next game in the lower level or in other higher-priced areas of the DCU Center rather than the cheaper seats in the upper level. It’s also less taxing on the ticket staff knowing they can move on to another game instead of worrying about selling seats beyond the 5.720 mark.
It doesn’t take a genius to know it’s better to get maximum ticket revenue on that 5,720 number as opposed to making less than that by selling a handful more tickets in a section that costs a significant amount to open. It also doesn’t take a genius to reply to social media posts without knowing a single fact about the thing you’re replying to.
But at least we get to laugh at you, and that’s priceless.
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