That’s Cold

As a long-suffering fan of the once-mighty Los Angeles Dodgers, I can say with some confidence that the biggest problem with professional sports today is the extent to which it has become not only a business but a faceless, impersonal business that would make the average bank or telephone company look good in comparison. One could legitimately point out that most professional sports teams are, in fact, giant corporations that employ thousands of people (beyond the 25 or 65 or 12 players on the team itself) and have to claw for their profits in an Entertainment industry that becomes more and more crowded with each passing day. But, as previously noted in this space, the problem with all giant corporations, entertainment-oriented or not, is that they are only as good as the front-line customers-service personnel who represent the face of the company – and the team – where your customers are concerned. And that means that unless every employee at every level is actually committed to providing the best possible experience, you’re eventually going to have a story pop up where it is clear that your entire organization just doesn’t care…

Consider, if you will, the curious case of the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team. Following a series of not especially sterling performances, the team was sold to a Canadian corporation, which promptly announced that it was moving the team to Winnipeg. There’s nothing particularly wrong about the move in itself; hockey is far more popular in Canada than it is in the United States, and there’s certainly reason to believe that the new owners might do better for themselves if they moved the team. What was somewhat off-putting was the fact that, according to this piece from Yahoo Sports , the team was still promoting – and selling – season ticket packages for the next season right up until the time when the move was officially announced…

Now, I’m sure that all of the people who ordered season tickets will eventually get their money back – assuming that they didn’t just cancel their credit card order or dispute the charge as soon as they heard about the move announcement. And I don’t think we can blame this on the people working the season ticket ordering phone lines, since they were almost certainly instructed to keep selling tickets and ignore whatever they might have heard about a sale and the team’s plans to move, or even on their supervisors, who would have been told to keep pushing tickets until the last moment. After all, every day the team can hang onto the funds before having to return them is a day they can earn interest on that money – and at $1,000 per seat for the cheap seats, that kind of thing adds up after a while. But what this tactic tells me is that whoever owned the team up until now is either sleazy enough to want to skim off a few extra days or weeks of interest or lazy enough not to care – and either way, they’re defrauding their own fan base…

Of course, in the long run it won’t matter. The Thrashers are leaving town, and even if the same ownership group eventually purchases another local sports franchise, the average fan won’t remember that this group was using them to make money when their last team moved away. But whether we consider this to be fraud or incompetence, I think this one simple act tells us everything we need to know about the Thrasher’s outgoing ownership group – and exactly what they think of their loyal fans. It may be legal; it might even become customary some day, but it’s still a very cold thing to do to your customers…