Star Wars Bartering

On Wednesday night, some co-workers, Rain, and I went to the midnight showing of Episode III at Gallery Place. The theatre sold so many tickets, it had to increase the number of theatres showing the movie from three to six. Most of the people in our party had theatre 10 and three had theatre 12. So three of us, Rain, co-worker Taren, and I set off to get everyone T10 (theatre 10) tickets by bartering with others. Taren found a young woman wanting two T12 tickets and willing to trade for theatre 10 tickets. Perfect. So I get set to trade our tickets, when I realize I have two theatre 12 tix and a credit card stub (which I thought I threw out). Whoops! I had accidentally tossed away Dave's theatre 12 ticket. Well, no matter at that moment, we still had two tickets to trade. After that trade we needed a ticket for Dave and a ticket for co-worker Allison who hadn't bought a ticket yet. It turned out that the same young woman we traded with had two extra tickets, so we bought back our original theatre 12 tickets. Then I made my second dumb move for the evening: in trying to trade for two theatre 10 tickets, I traded for one theatre 10 ticket and one theatre 13 ticket. I thought that Settlers of Catan-like trade was progress...survey says: X. Now we were stuck with one theatre 13 ticket, and even though theatre 13 moviegoers didn't have to wait in line (they were already being seated), trading a single ticket is difficult (to say the least). Taren gets the idea that we should try to trade the ticket in at the counter, but the cinema will only give out theatre 9 tix, since they are still selling theatre 9 seats. Taren also thinks we may be able to sell several of our T10 tix for T13 tix and then split into two groups. But I wasn't willing to give up the chance to all sit together just yet. Yet another option was to buy an extra ticket to pair with our current T13 (which we would have traded for a T9) and eat the $10. We then both (1) found a couple with T10 tix willing to trade and (2) thought of the fact that we could cinema-trade one T13 and one T10 for two T9's and then barter them off. Hence: success! Everyone got to watch Star Wars in the same theatre. (Thoughts on the actual movie a bit later.)