Ever Feel Like You’ve Been Cheated?

Today Matt Teri posted a copy of the letter that Redskin fans are receiving about the recent stadium renovations, and how it pertains to the season tickets waiting list. If you haven’t already seen it, you can check it out here.

Ever seen the movie Sid and Nancy? There’s a scene in it where Johnny Rotten is sick of Sid’s crap and looks at the crowd and says, “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?”

That’s all I can hear in my head after reading this drivel, so I felt compelled to address a few items. What follows are some excerpts from the official letter, and a satirical, near sardonic interpretation by yours truly:

1) “We are writing to clear up some recent confusion in the media regarding the status of our season ticket Wait List.”

We actually wanted to do all of this without telling you at all, and hope that nobody noticed. We forgot that in this incredibly plugged-in, technical world, you would find out anyway. So here’s what we in the marketing business call spin control.

2) “Please rest assured that your name remains on the list, and that this is the only way to obtain Redskins general admission season tickets. We continue to have one of the largest season ticket Wait Lists in the NFL, and we are one of just a few teams that has a Wait List at all.”

We have been guerilla marketing email addresses and names from every promotion that you’ve ever participated on at Redskins.com (and you probably didn’t realize that you had been added to the waiting list), but this allows us to pump up the fan base with stories of how popular our average product still is. We have sweatshops of people telemarketing to sell the things, but for some reason, people aren’t that interested in dropping $500-700 to take their family to see a 6-10 team.

3) “Because of the labor dispute between the League and the Players Association, in February of this year we discontinued most of our efforts to sell season tickets.”

Because we could not sell the last 10,000 tickets, we decided to hack them out of the stadium in hopes that we wouldn’t have to buy that many tickets ourselves next year to avoid public blackouts.

4) “We did not want to put our fans in the position of having to buy tickets with a lockout imminent or risk losing their place on the Wait List.”

And it would be too logical to keep the season ticket waiting list the same, should their be any type of work stoppage for the regular season.

5) “This gave us the opportunity to commence our Upper Level renovation project with our energy partner NRG, which will include solar panels as part of our effort to make FedExField one of the leaders in “going green”.”

Our hope is that by partnering with our energy partner NRG, and by talking about Fed Ex going green, we can deflect from the fact that we just eliminated more than 10% of our stadium’s capacity.

6) “For 2011, this project will reduce stadium capacity through the removal of thousands of seats that our fans have told us are the least desirable in the stadium.”

We didn’t ask you, but we hope that if we tell you how crappy the seats were in the first place, you’ll forget that we were happy to collect $79 a head from you for them in the past. And again, saying they were garbage anyway, is a great misdirection for us.

7) “This renovation will improve your game day experience by reducing traffic into and out of Stadium parking lots, creating shorter lines for escalators and restrooms, and allowing easier access to concessions.”

At least now only 80,000 people will have traffic issues and not 90,000. Plus, when we raise concession prices by 10% – we should still realize the same profits there too. Dasani’s are worth the $10 when you’re parched and have no options. And the line will be SHORTER!

8 ) “We are continuing the planning process with our engineers and architects for party decks in the Upper Level, and we hope to finish that process and provide you with more details by late this year. We are confident that when this process is complete, all of our fans will regard it as a major improvement to FedExField.”

We’re going to try something totally different. We hope that the team will get better and we will be in a better position to exploit our incredibly loyal fan base in one year’s time.

9) “Thank you for your patience and support in this unusual year. Feel free to call the Ticket Office at 301-276-6033 if you have any questions. We look forward to having you join the team and become a season ticket holder over the next few seasons.”

Thank you for your money. We look forward to taking more of it.

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Well Redskin fans, I for one am not buying it. I think that Redskin fans are doing the right thing by following a product less blindly. Keep up the good work!

This blog is purely for entertainment purposes and no animals were harmed in the making of it.

Thanks for listening. Hail to the Redskins.