Tell me about it.... I can't imagine the gold package selling too well because most of the Niagra games are crappy matchups (with no incentive to purchase), but the Silver + Bronze packages are great. Sure, you have some crappy games, and for a Canadian it would be tough to get rid of those, but it also gets you medal round tickets.
It is clear that there is price gouging going on -- the Canada-Czech game tomorrow is another where the cheapest seats in the rink are $70 for an individual seat and over $100 for almost every other seat. It's clearly being done to drill cash out of Canadian fans and at the same point it scares the locals away because it is more than they are willing to spend.
Definitely. It's hard to accomplish (and highly frowned upon if done in extreme levels), but what they really needed to do was be able to figure out a way to price gouge Canadians, yet make the american games accessible to Americans for cheaper. They are sort of doing that:
-cheapest seat for a Canada game is $70 (Canada-Sweden is $80)
-cheapest seat for an American game is $65
-cheapest seat for a Finland-Germany (and basically all non-USA/Canada) game is $25.
The mistake seems to be in the american pricing. No Canadian is going to buy an individual ticket for a USA game, regardless of price.... yet there were 4000 tickets unsold for last nights game. Then again, it also doesn't look good on tournament organizers to price Canada at $70, and USA at $35.
This tournament is an opportunity for USA Hockey to generate fans for life (and more interest on ESPN and such), and they're blowing it. In today's world, it's all about media coverage, TSN manufactured the world juniors to be huge in Canada, the states needs the same thing. The alternatives for Americans were tough, they can pay $65/game to watch in the upper bowl, or they can buy the entire tournament for $500 / seat, and then go through the hassle of trying to get rid of a bunch of tickets (although they problably could've made their money back simply by selling the Canadian games).
Maybe they expected higher intelligence levels from ticket buyers? An american could problably sell the 4 Canadian round robins on the street or StubHub for $30 each, and a 2 medal round games for $50 each. All of a sudden that's $280 to attend 4 USA Round Robin Games, and the Semis + Finals. $45/seat isn't too bad.