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Why Stadiums Can Charge Whatever They Want for Food

Food and drinks at most US sports stadiums cost significantly more than they cost outside the venue. Exclusive concession contracts, private stadium operations and restrictions on outside food have created a captive market that allows teams and vendors to charge fans more, even though many stadiums were built with taxpayer dollars. We examined some of the proposed laws that could limit concession markups and hold publicly funded stadiums more accountable for high prices.

00:00 – Intro
01:21 – Concessionaire Control
04:05 – Corporate Ownership
06:05 – Concession Prices Today
08:28 – Captive Audience in Stadiums
09:35 – New Bills
13:19 – ‘Fan First’ Pricing
15:15 – Future of Stadium Food Pricing
16:18 – Credits

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#stadiumfood #sportsstadium #concessions #soexpensive

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Why Stadium Food Is So Expensive | So Expensive | Business Insider

22 Comments

  1. Not sure why 15 minutes are needed, the answer is simple: because people pay. Don't go to stadiums, don't buy food and drink, and see how fast prices go down.

  2. Good thing i like to stay in lol cant afford to live, cant afford to go out like that.

  3. What's funny is most of these stadiums are owned or developed by local governments, paid $25 for a small tiny little drink at a baseball game that was half empty.

  4. I go many baseball games .
    Nobody forces you to buy the food.
    The other day leaving a Yankees game I saw people lined up at the
    Ice cream stand.
    They can buy all the ice cream they want outside as there leaving but there choice to pay double!

  5. I worked at Burger King in an airport. A Whopper meal was about $30. They weren’t charging that because it cost more.. they charged it because travelers had no real alternative. That’s the definition of a captive market.

  6. with the product the Dodgers are putting on the field they should be charging more.

  7. Capitalism has benefits and flaws. A sports stadium perfectly encapsulates it's flaws. The benefits from it only work if there is extreme competition, with regulations enforcing competition being the necessary theoretical flood wall. When everything is a subsidiary system, non owners are charged a temporarily non fatal price, not a viable one. The public consumer becomes flooded with extra expenses, and that money trickles into the owners pockets. Trickle down economics should be renamed evaporation economics, and the owners are the clouds. This playbook is in hyperdrive(and has been employed more or less for millennia), but is only successful when the average person is forced or manipulated into ambivalence. Why do we allow ourselves to be exploited? Because we are ruled, not represented. Vote for those that represent, not those that rule. Vote for Unions. Vote for equal representation. Stop supporting anything resembling a ruling class.

  8. THEY ONLY CHARGE IT BECAUSE THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT. I love baseball but I do not buy anything at the concession and I only pay face value for tickets. I also use a medical exemption to bring food in. I will say, they do not make it easy. Just walking in with a note from your doctor, even though they are required to accommodate, it is always a hard time. I have came to the stadium on a non-game weekday and spoke with the people in charge to actually show them what I have from my doctor and show pictures of the contents of what I plan to bring in. Usually bottled water and unsweet iced tea and a few sandwiches I made at home. Then, after I got the letter, I went to the security office to speak to people in charge to make sure I have no problems. Now, its easy to go in with my food, even though I shouldnt of had to go through all of that.

  9. Soda and food shouldn’t be that expensive. I understand alcohol being people would be drunk as hell and sports fans can get really emotional. Bringing my two kids to a sports game is crazy expensive.

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