At 10am today Eagles single-game seats went on sale and as expected they were sold out in under an hour (actually it only took 40 minutes). But this year tickets were only available through Ticketmaster either buy calling their phone number or, as most people would do, through their website. As The Inquirer points out, trying to buy tickets was an exercise in frustration. But all is not lost, you can still buy tickets from Ticketmaster, well sort of.

When tickets sell out it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be able to buy seats, it just means you’re going to have to do some searching and probably pay a little more. But usually it’s calling some shady ad from the paper or dealing with the “Need ‘em, Got ‘em” guy walking around the stadium. Not anymore, this is the 21st Century and instead of the little guy making some extra dough from re-selling tickets, companies like Ticketmaster do it themselves.

Just go to ticketsnow.com where you’ll be able to find as many tickets as you want. Let’s look at the Eagles first game of the season against the St. Louis Rams. As of 2pm, TicketsNow had 1785 tickets available ranging in price from $118-$696 each. Let’s look again at Peter Mucha’s piece on Philly.com today where he said he bought a ticket for that same game this morning in section 203 for $75. A similar ticket is now selling on TicketsNow for $161-$177. That’s an $86-$102 markup.

How does TicketsNow do it? Well, they do allow people like you and me to sell our tickets on their site. So, if for some un-Godly reason your wife or girlfriend roped you into a wedding on October 5, you can sell your Eagles-Redskins tickets there (actually you should break-up with or divorce that woman, but that’s another story). But, many ticketbrokers use software that allows them to grab multiple tickets at once, they then put those tickets on sites like TicketsNow to re-sell.

Ok, so what’s the big deal you say? Isn’t this just how capitalism works? Well, not when Ticketmaster is the one who is essentially re-selling the tickets and benefiting from the markup. Yup, in February of this year Ticketmaster bought TicketsNow, which seems like a big conflict of interest, right?

Last April Ticketmaster sued RMG Technologies to stop them from selling their ticket-buying software to brokers. So, clearly Ticketmaster is against the idea of brokers buying up tickets. But, they don’t have a problem allowing those brokers to use their service to rip you off.

By the way, TicketsNow isn’t the only problem. StubHub has 573 tickets for that same game ranging from $100-$1775. There are also 45 tickets on eBay for the Rams game, plus a handful on craigslist. Assuming none of these are multiple listings, there are over 2,400 tickets available online for the Rams game alone.

Ummm, is there something wrong here?