Pistons and Red Wings to Stop Issuing Paper Tickets

Feeling old yet? The advancing digital-mobile world is about to claim another victim: the paper ticket. Little Caesars Arena announced Wednesday its plans to switch to mobile ticketing for all Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Pistons games. Starting with the upcoming 2018-19 season, fans will no longer be able to use paper tickets to enter the arena. Instead your ticket will be a bar code delivered to your phone for scanning on entry.

Don't have a smart phone, forgot to charge it up, left it in the car? "Fans whose phone is broken or loses connection on game day are asked to visit the Little Caesars Arena XFINITY Box Office to have tickets printed. A photo ID that matches the name on the account should be presented."

So there will still be some paper. And I imagine they will have lines they won't believe once this confusion take hold.

What the article doesn't mention is what about all the scalper jobs that will be lost?

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There will be some growing pains for sure, but I think the end result will be worth it.

Just checking around a few websites, but it appears that in most reports, smartphone usage is over 75% for the general population. In the age breakdown of course, those under 30 years old command the largest chunk and those over 65 the smallest.

However, I'm now hitting 50 and use my smartphone for everything, including gaining access to events. I've attended a number of Wings and Tigers games over the past year or three as well as number of concerts and didn't use a printed ticket for any of them. I primarily use Ticketmaster or Seatgeek for ticket purchases, both of which send bar codes directly to your device.

My main beef with printed-at-home tickets is the waste. On a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper, only about 10% of it is devoted to the actual ticket with the bar code. The rest of the space is used for ads which I didn't ask to be printed [[using my ink), don't use or even look at.

I'm completely on board with this decision.

I have bought all my tickets from Stubhub for the past few years [[at below face value). Do they send barcodes to your phone now?

I've used the mobile entry for a while now. Besides the occasional time when I can't load the website right away, it's never been an issue. I can't see myself going back to printing tickets. I don't even own a printer!

I look at this as also helping the out of control secondary market on tickets. Our sports teams will not be bad forever. When they are good again there will still be a secondary market, but it will also be possible to get into a big game or playoff game without paying out the butt to scalpers on the street.

As I type that though I realize that fewer tickets for resale means higher prices...so what the hell do I know!?!

I'm not sure this does anything to deal with the scalpers. You are allowed to do a direct transfer of your ticket to anyone using the District Detroit App. You could do this standing outside the stadium. It even makes it better for the person buying off the scalper. You know you have a good ticket after it's been transferred through the app. You don't have to worry about a photocopied scan code being distributed to hundreds of people.

I don't think they care as much about the handful of people standing outside the stadium scalping tickets making a few bucks, but rather online resellers, which for the most part could not be tracked by the team, especially if you could just upload a PDF to Craig's List, Stubhub, Facebook, etc. Now that the PDFs are gone, the team gets a cut and knows who the purchaser is each time a ticket is sold and resold via Ticketmaster.

Here's a pretty good explanation: https://www.umbel.com/blog/sports/mo...sical-tickets/