Steve Kupferman: Giving Away Movie Tickets on Craigslist For Fun and Profit

It was Friday. I was planning on meeting someone at a particular theater, on Saturday at 7:00 p.m., to see the new Harry Potter movie (which yes, I was looking forward to, though I've never read the books) and I thought it would be a good idea to buy tickets in advance, because Harry Potter fans are hardcore and there just was no telling how many of them would show up to any given screening.

The movie theater was a fancy, newfangled one in North York, and their corporate website had a nice feature where all you had to do was type in your credit card number and you could get tickets in advance, emailed to you in printable PDF format. Instant gratification. As a typical millennial internet degenerate, I expect nothing less.

I got out my credit card and clicked a bunch of buttons, and things happened really quickly the way they tend to online. This was good; I was getting things done. I could feel a sense of power and productivity washing over me, confirming my essential trust in the internet as a place where all positive things in life begin and end.

Moments later, my card had been dinged for $25.50 and I had two e-tickets in my inbox. They were for 7:00 p.m., but for the showing on Friday, rather than the one on Saturday. My mistake. I went back and checked the fine print I'd ignored before the transaction, and sure enough, there were no refunds. For various reasons, Friday night was inconvenient. I couldn't use the tickets myself.

The internet had failed me. And so, in typical millennial internet degenerate fashion, I turned to the internet for solutions.

I posted the following to the "Free Stuff" section of Craigslist Toronto:

Two Tickets to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, 7PM

I bought two e-tickets to tonight's 7:00 p.m. showing of Harry Potter, at the Empress Walk Theatres in North York, by mistake. (My intention was to buy tickets to tomorrow night's show.)

My loss is your gain. I will send both tickets, in the form of a printable PDF, to the first person who emails me a description of what they'd like to achieve in the coming year, 2011. Yes. In exchange for a night of entertainment, valued at $25, all I ask is that you share your short-term aspirations with me, a total stranger.

I'll send the tickets no later than 6:00 p.m

The reason I decided to give the tickets away, rather than sell them, was that the show was only about two hours away, and I didn't think it would be possible to find a buyer in time. I used Craigslist because I couldn't think of anyone I knew personally who would have wanted to travel to North York for a movie on a Friday night.

I decided to ask a question of people interested in the tickets for the reason that I wanted some kind of return on investment for my non-refundable $25.50. I settled on asking about asiprations because they're a personal topic, but not a particularly touchy one, meaning people wouldn't necessarily be afraid to discuss theirs candidly. I suppose, rather than offering the tickets to the first person to respond, I could have said that I was going to use the aspirations as criteria for deciding who to send them to, but I didn't want people to feel as though making shit up would help them "win." The point of the exercise was to get an honest survey of what Craigslist lurkers want out of life. I wanted all the sociological insight twenty-five bucks could buy.

The first response was from a guy named Jack, who wrote:

In the year 2011, I would like to quit smoking, Be a better father/and lover and spend more time with my loved ones, Contunie with my jon working with homeless men.

(Everything, naturally, [sic].)

The next response was from Joe:

Hey ! Still have the tickets up for grabs? I live just down the street from there. Um ..im working on having a child in 2011, its not really work but actually kinda fun..lol. Thanks, J.

And then there was Vivian, who came off initially as a nice sort of person:

hello my aspirations for the coming year are to be accepted to university of waterloo for architecture. it's really a difficult program to get into so basically my life outside of school right now is non-existent. anyways it's really cool that you want to hear peoples goals, because i'm a complete stranger so why would you care about what i hope to achieve, right? but i guess you do. its nice to see there is still some good... thanks.

She followed up with a second message:

sorry im messaging twice but i just had an afterthought. it just occured to me the irony of your giving away two movie tickets because i lost my wallet a couple days ago and i had 2 free movie passes in there that i had gotten from a timeshare session. anyways, just thought i'd share that. thanks again.

Riiight.

Someone named "wook" also sent an email:

please send me.

thanks

[phone number redacted]

They didn't follow the rules, so I disqualified them outright.

And then there was this one:

Hi, I’m 14 years old and I’m interested in these tickets. I go to [a private Catholic school] on scholarship, and my goal is to do well there in the next four years, not just 2011.

Thank you,

Helena

Helena's email was my favorite of the lot, but she was the last to respond, and a deal is a deal—even when the deal was brokered on Craigslist with zero accountability. I sent the tickets to Jack and wished him luck with kicking the smokes. And then he sent me this:

I appreciate the offer, give it to someone who wants to go, I like sharing my insirations with ppl

So I sent the tickets to Helena, whose mother wrote me back immediately to say thank you, and to inform me that Helena and her father were leaving for the theater right away.

In the end, Jack got to feel like a good guy for selflessly turning down the tickets, Helena got to go see a movie with her dad, and I got to bask in the warm, gooey, nutmeg-scented feeling of having made a few strangers happy. Without the internet, none of this would have been possible, so I guess me and it remain on good terms.

Of course, I'm still out $25.50.