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Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

There are only so many lots within a few blocks of this venue. Most are owned by the single company. Parking price is not known ahead of time. The full price (including parking) of attending the event isn't know until you arrive, after a long drive into the city. Sure $5 is fine, but it's demand-based. There's nothing that prevents them from making the price floor $50 for a large name artist, and attendees would be caught in a lurch. The whole operation rubs me the wrong way.

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And the demand pricing always skews one way: to the parking operator. The old daily price is now the new baseline and it only moves up from there. You know your lot will be full during the big game, so might as well extort them I guess is what they are teaching in business schools these days. Disturbing times ahead.

If your parking lot is full, then that still means that all the people who came later won't be able to park. Raising the price excludes a different set, but it's not immediately obvious to me which one is better.

Probably part of it is increasing wealth inequality playing a role. Now that there are more rich people around prices affordable to this group can be charged and still fill out events. Decades ago there were fewer of this sort of potential customer when more people made closer to median wages. In the end the median worker suffers from fewer affordable entertainment options as these are binned to higher incomes. The most obvious model of this is the ski or resort town where this sort of demographic crisis can play out in mere years after a resort opening in a formal rural township with highly uneven economic demographic growth. New housing supply is almost always exclusively made for higher income people due to the cost of construction and land demanding certain margins, so median wage workers are further hurt as they wait for this new housing to depreciate over decades and only if new housing continues to be built unhindered (not a sure thing unlike the yearly new to used car market).

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