MLB charges extra if you print your tix

You’ve gotta love how companies figure ways to make you pay a premium to reduce their cost and increase their profits.

Remember back when Touch-Tone dialing was new, and the phone company charged an extra $1 or more per month to enable tone dialing on your account? Their cost was actually lower than if you kept using a rotary phone, because pulse dialing had to be switched on expensive relays, and tone-based calls could be directed over inexpensive electronic switches. But that didn’t stop Ma Bell and its offspring from charging its customers another few bucks of pure profit… for decades.

Major League Baseball does something similar. I just ordered some tickets for an upcoming San Francisco Giants game. Not only does mlb.com charge you an “order processing and delivery” fee of $4.00, but MLB charges you more if you want to print the tickets yourself on your own printer.

There are five ways to get your tickets:

1. Print tickets at home (which they say is recommended!) — $2.50 surcharge
2. Have them sent out by 3-day FedEx — $15.50 surcharge
3. Have them sent out by overnight FedEx — $19.50 surcharge
4. Have them sent out by regular mail — free
5. Pick them up at Will Call — free

Let me get this straight: Mailing them out using the U.S. Postal Service requires that MLB print the physical tickets, someone stuffs them into the envelope, and then there’s a cost for postage. But that’s free to me.

But instead MLB recommends that I pay a $2.50 premium to let their servers generate a ticket image, which I’ll print off using my own paper and my own ink… while saving them human handling and postage. (Plus, tickets printed at home make lousy souvenirs.)

Needless to say, I’ll be awaiting my game tickets’ arrival through the regular mail.