I love music and I enjoy going to concerts.  From time to time, I also buy t-shirts that have some of my favorite bands on them.  If you're anything like me and you like music and these types of shirts, you probably know how much tickets and clothing cost, and how the prices can escalate at a concert.

     When I buy music t-shirts, I usually shop at Hot Topic which charges around $17, usually less.  If you buy these same shirts at a concert, you will easily pay $35 for a shirt, along with inflated prices for nearly every other type of merchandise you can imagine.  Some concert tickets are ridiculously priced, $8 to $10 beverages are not uncommon, then to make matters worse, the fans are getting gouged for supporting their favorite bands.

     Since band merchandise is created by the band by cutting out the middle-man and they don't have the overhead that a store would have, shouldn't they have a lower break-even point than stores?  It looks that way to me, yet they are charging more than twice the amount for their merchandise than a typical store would charge.

     It's a free country and a person should be allowed to charge as much as they want for their merchandise.  With that said, we also have the freedom to shop for the best prices.  I hope the next time you go to a concert you think twice about buying merchandise at the show and opt to buy it from a store.  I think there is something fundamentally wrong with a band gouging their most loyal fans.  Don't they already make enough money from us?