> Why is food so expensive at sporting events? ... why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people.

Because there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up to 50% of the revenue, and concessionaires, who employ the servers and supply the actual food.

Venue operators and sports teams don't like the liability and cost exposures of serving food, so they farm it to a third party. And rather than carve that up into multiple competing vendors, most modern large venues hand it to a single hospitality company, who uses scale to lower costs and offer a lower share of revenue in exchange for exclusivity over all venue food service. Without competition, they can jack the price up.

Worth noting two things on the "why not raise ticket prices" angle: ticketing is moving in the same outsourced direction as concessions, and ticket prices are going up anyway (up >100% since 1999[1]).

> Across pro sports, Matheson says, teams are making the determination that "they can make more money selling fewer, more expensive tickets rather than lots of cheap seats."

Most venues have given up having their own box offices and farm that out to StubHub, TicketMaster, etc. Same motivations, same result: the venue spends less by contracting out ticketing, the team gets a bigger cut of the revenue, and the ticket vendors get exclusive control not only over selling the tickets but reselling them, with dark patterns like dynamic pricing and fees piled onto the buyer at every part of every transaction.

Both wipe out all competition on both quality and price. Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. Apply that pattern to existing fanbases grown over generations during eras of better prices or quality and you get a captive audience who complains constantly but never quits spending, so there's no pressure to lower prices or improve quality.

1: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5561909/ticket-prices-s...

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ianferrel 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose.

But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.

And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.

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trollbridge 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I stopped caring about my favourite sports teams approximately 10 years ago, and now that I have kids, I probably won't ever take them to a pro game, and they'll probably grow up barely knowing what they are. They're completely cannibalised any kind of future for themselves, because I'm not the only person I know who's done this.

My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.

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immibis 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the same pro sports industry that already stops you watching matches on TV once a week, spreads them over several different streaming platforms so you pay several times, and is currently trying to make it so you can't watch matches on devices that can sideload apps. Apparently, their revenue has only been going up, even with all these shitty things already happening...

	▲	ianferrel 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, it is going up. For now. And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as much about the team, or the sport, and so on. What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For some people and some things, the short-term demand is very inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the people making these decisions have better models of that than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.

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WesleyJohnson 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would add that there is psychology at play as well. Someone might scoff at a $200 ticket, thinking it's ridiculous to pay that much, even if you could then eat at the venue for $20.

But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.

	▲	recursivecaveat 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely. There's almost always a strong incentive to move charges as far back into the flow as possible. Knock $5 off your ISP package price, then hit them with a $5 "infrastructure fee" at the credit card screen. For consumers, just because you picked a higher upfront price for a service doesn't mean you'll you won't be nickle-and-dimed later in addition, so it is not trivial to avoid. I guess you can view the "free with ads" model as the most popular implementation: get people in the door and then charge them with their time at crazy rates.