Along with probably tens of thousands of other Nittany Lion football ticketholders, I received a momentous email from Penn State Athletics at a little after 5 p.m. last Wednesday. It was an email that continued the process of what many of us hope is a return to hanging out in Beaver Stadium with 107,000 of our closest friends on seven Saturdays this fall. An exciting process that started on June 1 with Penn State’s announcement of a return to 100% capacity at athletics venues, and was followed on June 8 by an email letting us know we could now renew our season tickets.
This email last Wednesday was momentous because, for the first time since late 2019, I now had access to our Penn State season football tickets. In addition they could now be managed, transferred and added to my wallet.
Except, the “wallet” they are referring to isn’t the brown, folded-leather, Penn State-imprinted billfold for my credit cards, driver’s license, insurance cards and other personal items that I carry around any time I leave home. It seems the word “wallet” is now a generic term that refers to a place within the memory of your smartphone or the cloud where you can store items such as tickets.
Now, you may read that and think, “C’mon John, everybody knows what the wallet on their phone is!”
Or you might be in the technological minority like me and think, “Oh no, not another one of these crazy smartphone things!” Well, if you are in that technological minority, you probably already know the bad news: Penn State has gone to fully mobile ticketing in Beaver Stadium this year, meaning no paper tickets.
Granted, this change was first mentioned in that June 8 email, so Penn State has given us a bit of warning. But let’s look at this recent email in more detail.
First, it took me only a minute and 15 seconds to read the email and right away I was seriously concerned. Here’s a blow-by-blow of what happened.
The email says I need an iPhone or Android phone to access my tickets. Except I have a Samsung phone. I know it’s not an iPhone but I don’t have any idea whether it’s an Android or not. So I go into the “Settings” menu and scroll down to the “About phone” section and touch that. The screen that opens says it’s a Samsung SM-J327V phone. It shows my phone number, serial number and other details but doesn’t mention anything about an Android.
So now I turn to the internet. I open a search engine and type “Is a Samsung SM-J327V phone an Android phone?” The first item the search returns is from a website named PhoneMore.com. As I am always wary of websites I’ve never heard of, I go to the second option which is Samsung’s own website with a link to my specific model phone. Surely I’ll find answers there. I search through the manual online. I search through the full specs online. Nothing.
Not thrilled with the first option but feeling confident that my Norton Security software will stop any malicious attacks, I go back to the first link on the search results and click it. Partway down the page I see this review of my phone, “Good Android phone…” Well, it’s a nameless website, but it’s the best information I’ve got to go on, so let’s hope they are right and that I do have a phone compatible with this new ticketing process.
Next, the email reads that, “Mobile ticketing will provide increased ticket security, reduced risk of lost, stolen or counterfeit tickets, and provides easier ticket management.”
Well, I’m not sure how mobile ticketing provides increased ticket security. For example, let’s look at the airline industry – an industry that uses mobile ticketing at levels well beyond what Penn State ever will. Let’s just randomly pick one airline: American Airlines. In 2019, American flew over 215 million passengers. Yet on American’s website, the only reason they tout for using mobile ticketing is because it’s fast and convenient. If it increased ticket security, don’t you think American would want to promote that benefit to their 215 million passengers?
As for reducing the risk of lost, stolen or counterfeit tickets, I guess that could be true. Although having never lost a ticket, or had one stolen or counterfeited, maybe I’m in the minority and never experienced such a problem. Perhaps I’m just unaware of the widespread illicit ticket activities apparently taking place out there.
But as far as providing easier ticket management, I have to disagree. At this point in the email I’ve spent 10 minutes just trying to determine if I have the correct equipment to even get my tickets, let alone know how to use them, something that wouldn’t take ten seconds with paper tickets. Coincidentally, using the airlines as a comparison again, there are traveling pros who suggest that even if you use mobile ticketing on airlines you should still carry a paper boarding pass.
The email then goes on to have me click a video link to learn about the key steps in this process. Which I studiously click only to find myself staring at the toes of an individual suffering from severe toenail fungus. Luckily I’m able to “Skip Ad” after a few seconds and get to the important stuff.
Uh oh. The first thing I learn is that I have to download a mobile app. The Official Penn State Athletics Mobile App to be precise. “Oh boy, here we go,” I think to myself.
So I open up the app window on my phone and click on Galaxy Store. I make sure I’m in the App mode (not Games) and click on the Search icon in the upper right. I type (one letter at a time with my large fingers) “Penn State Athletics Mobile App”, and click the search icon. Several options pop up – the first is Penn State Nittany Lions Official Text Stickers. The next is Penn State Nittany Lions Official Photo Stickers. Then it’s Florida State Seminoles Official Text Stickers. As I scroll down the options… Grambling State, Mississippi State, Kansas State, and on and on, it’s clear there is no Penn State Athletics Mobile App as a choice.
Undeterred, I close the window, and look for another option to add an app. I find that if I open the Samsung window, I can click the Add Apps icon at the bottom of that screen. This time I only type “Penn State Athletics Mobile” because I’m limited to only 30 characters. I click Go and get “No results found.” I try “Penn State Athletics” and again get no results. After five minutes of trying several options I realize the search function is only looking through apps I already have installed. Clearly I’ll need to do some internet searching on how to add apps to my phone as I’m having little success. But we’ll deal with that later as at this point I’m only 35 seconds into a 90 second video. Who knows, maybe the video will have some clues on how to get the app.
Unfortunately, not only are there no clues in the remaining 55 seconds of the video, it tells me that I’ll need either Apple Wallet or Google Pay to access my tickets. Information reinforced by bullet point No. 2 in the email. Since I don’t have an iPhone I’m guessing I won’t be getting Apple Wallet, and I know I don’t have Google Pay. I looked under the “Google” app button on my phone and saw the normal Google functions – Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google and others. But no Google Pay.
A quick internet search about Google Pay results in more questions – the instructions to add Google Pay provide directions that identify settings that are not on my phone, and it appears you have to add bank account information to make it work. Something I do not and won’t be adding to my phone. There is no credit card info on my phone. No bank account info. Nothing other than names and phone numbers and that’s the way it will stay.
Having finished the video I go back to the email and read further. Bullet point No. 2 also states that my smartphone needs to have a passcode or FaceID installed for my mobile wallet to work. Neither of which I have on my phone. I like using my smartphone to do many things – call, text and email. I don’t need to install a passcode or FaceID on my phone to do those things nor do I want to. When I’m ready to use my phone I pick it up and use it. Why is Penn State forcing me to make my life more difficult?
Finally, at the bottom of the email are several links for tutorials, including one on “How to Transfer Tickets”. Except there is at least one set of people I now can’t transfer my tickets to: my parents. They don’t own a smartphone. Again, they are part of the technological minority, but in somewhat good company. One of this country’s – and the world’s – most popular non-sporting television shows for the last two decades, “NCIS,” features a main character who regularly uses a traditional flip-phone.
After what seems like an hour of reading what should have been a joyous email, watching a video, conducting numerous internet searches and clicking multiple links looking for information, I’m not sure how well this ticketing process is going to work. And I haven’t even gotten to how I’m going to get each member of my family their ticket in case we don’t want to all walk in together. So why is Penn State making this wholesale rush into only having mobile ticketing? Why not allow ticketholders to print paper tickets as well?
As I said, I understand that most people have smartphones. A Pew Research study from earlier this year shows that 85% of the U.S. population has a smartphone. However, that percentage goes down to 61% for those over 65 years of age. Yet, even if we use the 85% rate, that means if PSU football fans are consistent with the population in general, there could be 15,000 ticketholders who don’t have smartphones. That’s a LOT of unhappy customers.
Granted, Penn State Athletics was planning ahead and has an answer to the “what if I don’t have a smartphone?” question. According to their FAQ page, those ticketholders without smartphones (or phones whose batteries have died) can visit the Beaver Stadium ticket office on game day. If you show a valid photo ID for the name on the ticket account you’ll, in theory, be granted admission. Of course if you’re one of those 15,000 people you’ll want to get to the ticket office early. Except the link to view the Beaver Stadium ticket office hours is not currently working. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon.
Here’s my concern. According to the annual reports submitted to the NCAA by Penn State, since the 2010-11 academic year, coaching salaries, benefits, and bonuses have gone from $14.1 million to $32.63 million in 2019-2020. That’s more than double. In the same time the support staff and administration salaries, benefits and bonuses have gone from $11.55 million to $27.54 million. That’s also well more than double. And based on listings in the Penn State football yearbook and on the athletic department’s website, the number of athletic department personnel with the words “Athletic Director” in their title has increased from 13 to over 30. All in 10 years – while overall athletic revenue went from $116 million to $165 million, a 42% increase, and while the Consumer Price Index went from 218.439 to 256.394, a mere 17% increase.
This points to a problem I’ve seen in the corporate world when you combine wholesale increases of salaries and staff without similar increases in revenue. You run into a scenario where employees begin to look for problems to fix to justify their presence on payroll even though those problems might not exist.
In this case we’ve got a technological advancement happening at record pace – smartphone ownership going from only 35% a decade ago to 85% today. Which opens up opportunities for many businesses. But even a technological giant such as Microsoft knows that when changing something as regularly updated as computer operating systems you try everything possible to make your new product backward-compatible with your old products so your loyal customers don’t get thrown out with the proverbial bathwater. Something I think may be the case with this ticketing policy.
A former Penn State football coach wrote a few words that may have some relevance in this situation:
“A football coach is at the pivot of a big ‘business’… If I’m coach, the service a fan gets when he orders tickets is a reflection of my football team. If the ticket office is dirty or the clerks and secretaries are rude, that’s a grubby reflection… As people buy a luxury product, whether it’s football at Penn State or in Green Bay,… they’re also buying a mystique. What every employee does contributes to it, and any employee can mess it up…”
All of which means, although I appreciate the desire to embrace mobile ticketing technology, I think the athletic department should follow the airline industry’s lead, reconsider their choice and allow ticketholders to print or easily access printed tickets because there are certainly enough Penn State fans for whom this process does not provide easier ticket management. Otherwise we may be looking at a repeat of the fiasco a few years ago that accompanied adding metal detectors and wanding at the entrance gates.
