Random Rant: ScotiaBank Centre

On Saturday night (November 24th), I attended the Sadies/Patti Smith/Neil Young triple bill at ScotiaBank Place in Kanata. I had a general admission ticket for the arena floor which had no seating. (Whether it is still even a half-decent idea for me at age 47 to pay for the privilege of standing for four-and-a-half hours and feel aching knees and ankles for the nest two days is a different conversation entirely.) These are the steps I had to go through to get to my 'seat':

- Line-up to get my ticket scanned when I entered the arena. (I do not have an issue with this.) - Find the entrance to one of the two stairways through the first bowl of the arena down which arena staff were allowing GA ticket holders to go down to the arena floor.

- Line-up to get my ticket verified as a GA ticket and to get issued a wristband which identified me as an 'official' GA patron, at which point my ticket was marked. Presumably this was done to stop another patron to leave his/her seat and come down to GA using my ticket.

- Now, this is where I get irked. Every time I had to go to the concessions (beer or food... Who am I kidding? Beer.) in the concourse on the 100 level (using one of the two, and only two, staircases), to return to the floor, I had to not only show my wristband to one of the attendants but also my ticket.

Let us think about that for an instant: ScotiaBank institutes a wristband system to identify GA attendees, but then does not bother recognising the wristbands. The paying, wristband-wearing patron has to balance his/her food or beverage to once again dig the ticket out of their pocket to once again prove that they are allowed to be where they paid a fair amount ($80 in this case) to be.

(And why are there not concession stands on the floor area? A beer counter and a rudimentary food counter (if need be) could easily be set up at the back of the floor to serve patrons during intermissions. This is done in other similar venues; the Bell Centre in Montréal comes to mind. It would certainly solve part of the issue.)

This may seem like a relatively minor inconvenience and I probably would not bring it up if I had not previously had issues with ScotiaBank Place staff implementing patron-unfriendly policies. I was once told during a Bruins-Sens game to sit down and not cheer so loudly for the Bruins. Friends of mine have seen the same thing happen as fans wearing opposing team colours who were far from being unruly were told by ScotiaBank Place staff to tone it down. It would appear that this is indeed a house policy.

This attitude towards paying customers (and again, I will point out that these are high-paying customers) just reeks with the utter arrogance that underlies customer service in a monopoly industry. ('We can do what we want to the paying twits; we have no competition! They have to come back!'). And in a way, it is true: ScotiaBank Place has no competition in the local market. It is the only venue that can host an NHL game or an arena-concert.

But, you know what, ScotiaBank Place, enough of us have been to out-of-town concerts to know that redundant redundant ticket checking policies are not the norm. Enough of us have been to out-of-town NHL games to know that ushers do not usually have in their job description suppressing cheering the opposing team. So, keep taking us for granted and alienating us, because you have no other competition, right? We will not stop coming to hockey games and concerts, right? At least 3,000 empty seats at every Sens game last year does not really matter, right?

Right?

Sent wirelessly from my BlackBerry device on the Bell network.
Envoyé sans fil par mon terminal mobile BlackBerry sur le réseau de Bell.