[QUOTE=feltdizz;586060]I was with you until you said dont pay less. Thats incredibly stupid. Market sets the price.[/QUOTE]
you MAY have been missing the sarcasm there!!!......:stirpot:stirpot
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[QUOTE=feltdizz;586060]I was with you until you said dont pay less. Thats incredibly stupid. Market sets the price.[/QUOTE]
you MAY have been missing the sarcasm there!!!......:stirpot:stirpot
[QUOTE=Starlifter;586096]you MAY have been missing the sarcasm there!!!......:stirpot:stirpot[/QUOTE]
Wooosh... flew over my head.
[QUOTE=birtikidis;585955]I wish that the fans that have no desire to go would go to the steeler message boards and offer them for sale before going public with them[/QUOTE]
This is true though
If you are die-hard enough to spend a fortune in some countries, for season-tickets... you should be die-hard enough to go through channels that will serve your team the best (i.e. get Steeler fans to replace you).
Personally, I'm not a season-ticket guy. I believe that the at-home experience long surpassed the stadium experience, starting with the day remote controls were invented. It has only become better, with sports bars and HDTV. Who the heck wants to pay quadruple of what you would at the local sports bar... and end the day sitting in traffic on your "rest day" (many of us sit in traffic all week).
It's funny to think that just a couple years ago it was Marvin Lewis imploring people not to sell their tickets to Steelers fans.
[B]The black & gold blues: Steelers fans take losses the hardest in the NFL[/B]
By Michael Sanserino / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A recent study proves what most in this city have long known: Steelers fans hate to lose.
Pittsburgh football fans are the saddest fans in the NFL after a loss, according to Michael Lewis and Manish Tripathi, two marketing professors from Emory University. The duo analyzed messages posted using the social media tool Twitter after every game of the 2012 National Football League season, using an algorithm to categorize tweets as positive or negative. In the two-day window that followed Steelers losses last season, 33.1 percent of tweets from the Pittsburgh area about the team were positive, the lowest percentage of any NFL team.
"That makes total sense to me," said Mr. Lewis, who grew up with an understanding of Steelers fans because his mother is from Western Pennsylvania.
If anything, the percentage might seem high to anybody who has turned on talk radio or sat in a barber shop after a Steelers loss.
The Detroit Lions -- no strangers to losing themselves -- had the second-lowest positive percentage at 37.1 percent.
Taken by itself, that number might be worth paying attention to just as fair warning for anyone visiting the area. But the region's emotional connection to its NFL team may also play out in terms of dollars spent at local businesses and even productivity in workplaces -- which is particularly bad news in this season of bad performances by the Steelers.
"We have a lot of Steelers fans that if they lose, they'll call off work the next day," said Jim Coen, owner and founder of Yinzers in the Burgh, a sports apparel store headquartered in the Strip District. "They're very passionate about their team."
He's seeing the agony of defeat in his sales results: Steelers merchandise sales are down 40 percent this year at Yinzers.
Ben Gunter, a front-of-house manager at Jerome Bettis Grille 36 on the North Shore, said the "Steelers Hangover" is pretty obvious after the team loses.
"People tend to go into hibernation after they lose," Mr. Gunter said. "Definitely after a loss, home or away, we'll see Steeler fans go home and hibernate before the other fans do."
This year's underwhelming season has had only a slight effect on the restaurant's business. That's because the restaurant attracts out-of-town fans, being that it is so close to Heinz Field.
The Steelers boast a sellout streak that dates to the 1970s; the secondary ticket market, however, has taken a hit this year.
StubHub.com, a San Francisco-based online ticket market, has observed a steep decline in resale prices for home Steelers games since 2011 -- the team's most recent winning season.
The median resale price for Steelers home games on StubHub.com this year is $127, down from $179 in 2012 and $180 in 2011.
The Emory study also concluded that Steelers fans are the second most "unstable" fans in the NFL, behind only the Oakland Raiders, a measure of the difference in their Twitter sentiment after wins and after losses. That means fans are happier than most when their teams win and sadder than most when their teams lose.
Following Steelers wins in 2012, tweets about the team from the Pittsburgh area were 79.6 percent positive -- an increase of 46.5 percent. The gap between the Raiders' highs and lows was 47 percent.
Fans of the Dallas Cowboys (4.8 percent) and Indianapolis Colts (5.7 percent) have much smaller gaps, leading Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tripathi to call them the most "stable" fan bases in the NFL.
The "happiest" fans in the NFL live in New Orleans, where 92.1 percent of all tweets following a Saints win are positive in nature, according to the study.
The researchers used Topsy, a San Francisco-based company that analyzes topics, terms and hashtags on Twitter. In posting their study to the Emory Sports Marketing Analysis blog in September, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tripathi indicated there were a few caveats to the study: It did not take into account fans' tweets from outside a team's specific market and it measured only those who use Twitter, a group that tends to be younger. In addition, it measured only one year.
But that year helped illustrate just how blue Steelers fans can get when the black and gold lose. While, for the most part, that doesn't put businesses in the red, it has introduced new patterns in spending connected to the team.
At the Residence Inn Pittsburgh North Shore, owned and operated by Kratsa Properties in Harmar, business has been steady this year but different than in previous years. While Steelers weekends typically sell out, the reservations have shown a lot more fluctuation, said general manager Connie Breen.
Since the hotel opened in 2010, reservations for Steelers weekends had been booked early and rarely canceled. This year, early bookings are being canceled with much more frequency.
"We still have two more games to play, and one being right after Christmas," Ms. Breen said. "We still have strong numbers for those days. It will be interesting."
The hotel did not sell out last Sunday when the Steelers lost to the Miami Dolphins, Ms. Breen said, but the nasty weather on game day was probably more to blame than the ugly play on the field.
Providing an unexpected assist from right field, it turns out the Pirates' baseball playoff run has been a help for many businesses weathering the gloomy Steelers season.
Mr. Coen of Yinzers said sales of Pirates apparel were up 90 percent over last year. Because of that boost, he said his overall sales entering December were even compared with last year. "It helped that much, where we had such a bad Steeler year that the Pirates picked it up enough that my overall business hasn't dropped," he said.
He has also taken advantage of sales woes at some of the big box stores, which are looking to unload Steelers merchandise in closeout sales. Some of that apparel will become next year's inexpensive inventory.
The football team's 2014 season will be better.
At least that's what Mr. Coen and many business owners who rely on Steelers fans for business hope.
"Steelers fans will forgive the organization for rebuilding," he said. "The city will give them a couple passes."
But if there is another lackluster season...
"People will start questioning things more," he said.
[URL]http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/s...#ixzz2nLchxKi8[/URL]
[QUOTE=MicroBioSteel;585974]There are socioeconomic changes occurring in the Burgh that are changing the constitution of fans that go to the game.
Since the mills closed in the 70's and 80's the city had been fairly depressed. For many people the only thing that kept our city positive through this depression was our blue collar heritage and championship history. Even during the 80's when the Steelers were playing poorly and the weather was atrocious many Pittsburghers preferred watching sub-par Steelers teams than facing the realities on the homefront.
I would say beginning in the mid 2000s Pittsburgh became competitive in attracting high paying tech jobs to the region and many of those people who took those jobs were boomerang Pittsburghers moving back home. On average, these workers have higher incomes than Pittsburghers who stayed and therefore drive the pricing for sporting events. Also, on average these people are not as connected to the blue collar heritage that Pittsburgh is synonomys for. They have no problem skipping a Steelers game if it really doesn't mean anything and the weather is not great.
The game has been yupified. The play on the field is softer and so are the fans. It's a reality that I have mixed feelings about because I grew up in the burgh and would like to return someday with a high paying job. First thing I would do is get some season tickets. Personally, I would give the tickets to my family if I could not make it to a game. No way would I sell tickets blindly. That's something that B-more fans do..lol! We have to realize that we on this board represent the top 1% of Steelers fans. Good, Bad, we will always be here posting away on these boards. It's just our thing.[/QUOTE]
I don't disagree. But, it was a lot easier to give them away when you didn't have to mortgage your house to buy them.
I also agree about the assessment of the current state of fans and the yuppi'ism. My seats are in the club level and I'm surrounded by business putz that use their seats as advertising with clients and who are more concerned about a 9 dollar weak a$$ drink. but what are ya gonna do? the steelers keep raising ticket prices.
one of the funnier aspects of Heinz is that when the steelers score, they award a section with a free hot dog. it's ALWAYS section 5 hundred something. Never down low or in the club. what's funny to me is those that sit at the top of the stadium aren't in those seats because there were plenty to choose from and that's all they could afford (and thus need a free hot dog) - it's simply all that was AVAILABLE.
but I digress. I miss the days of 3 rivers, cheap tickets, fanatical steel workers and football where you were allowed to hit your opponent.