You buy a beer from a vendor at a Jays game, and it winds up costing close to $20 after tax and tip.
You make the trek through Downsview to a show at our city’s new concert venue, and quenching your thirst with a small bottle of water runs you $7.
You take your kids to Canada’s Wonderland, and a pizza costs roughly double what the same chain charges elsewhere.
Even as the extortionary concession prices add up, for anyone able to afford admission for this sort of summer fun in the first place, grousing about them can feel futile. They’ve been the norm for as long as most of us can remember.
But that doesn’t mean they have to be accepted — and there’s a growing (if still fairly nascent) push for governments to do something about it.
The idea, broadly known as street pricing, is to use some combination of public pressure and a regulatory tool kit to require concession-stand food and beverages to be sold closer to normal market prices.
New York state is among the jurisdictions considering moving on it, with proposed legislation aimed at capping markups at 20 per cent above average prices within a 10-mile radius of venues, and there are fewer on this side of the border that have shown an interest.
But there are good reasons why provincial and municipal governments should start taking seriously what might seem a relatively trivial concern, amid all the other economic imperatives at the moment.
Start with what concession prices symbolize, in terms of corporate behaviour.
When I spoke this summer with Brian Shearer, a Vanderbilt University specialist in competition policy who’s been one of the leading voices in this movement, he told me he was drawn to the issue because it’s a visceral example of how corporations overcharge captive audiences. And it’s “emblematic of a broader problem in the economy,” he suggested, in which businesses “try to make more money not by making better products, but by nickel-and-diming their existing customers more and more.”
Another reason, which might be more compelling to policymakers, is the way profit-padding contributes to the feeling among ever-growing swaths of the population that life has become unaffordable.
A day at the amusement park or a night out to see a classic-rock act is not up there with groceries or shelter as basic necessities. But these inflationary costs still matter.
They can contribute to mass entertainment becoming luxury items — and to the sense that the pleasures of living in a big city like Toronto are being reserved for the relatively privileged, with everyone else forgoing them or grinding their teeth while outspending their budgets.
In a perfect world, owners would take it upon themselves to avoid that, which might actually be in their financial interests.
Since 2017, the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons have used a “fan-friendly” concessions model in which staples like hot dogs and soft drinks sell for as low as $2 throughout the venue. By the team’s account, that’s led to a 30 per cent increase in concessions transactions as well as an increase in the stadium’s total margins. And it’s helped prompt a few other teams, like the NHL’s Utah Mammoth, to follow suit.
But in Toronto, the size of the market and flow of corporate customers seem to have provided little incentive, save for a couple of isolated discount concession stands (and once-a-week cheap hot dog nights) at Jays games. Even at the smaller arena where the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo are a new entrant to the market, a bottle of pop costs $8.25 before tax.
That leaves an opening for enterprising politicians, albeit one that doesn’t lend itself to a single policy solution because of the array of products and concessions policies.
Advocates like Shearer suggest using several measures in combination.
The simplest would be to tie prices of premade items, like drinks and bags of chips, to the going rate elsewhere. Much more complex would be measuring input costs for food prepared inside the facilities, and capping markups at a reasonable rate. And governments could try to crack down on rates charged by venues to outside restaurants to sell their wares, which help explain why a sandwich costs so much more at their stadium stands than at their other restaurant locations.
Atop those, I’d add that venues could be required to allow customers to bring in their own food and drink — something you can do at the Rogers Centre, with some limitations, but not Scotiabank Arena or many other places.
Not that enforcing any of this, and the more nuanced measures especially, would be easy. We know that from Doug Ford’s attempt to cap ticket resales, which is at best a work in progress.
But even the threat of government action, let alone the occasional spot check if regulations went through, could be enough to get our corporate entertainment overlords to manage their PR by price-gouging a little less.
It’s worth a shot, anyway. At least Ontario’s government is trying to contain the expensiveness of getting in the door when we buy a ticket, to enter spaces that bring us communal public experiences despite their private ownership. But it shouldn’t ignore the costs once we’re inside.
