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May be, with the vastly reduce income the club has had over the last 16 months there isn't the money there to employ the staff needed to open the ticket office to walk ups and to open the shop more than a three days a week.
But the product is not available to everybody, why is it assumed that everyone has an iPhone, everyone has an email address, everyone shops online, everyone orders food and beer through an app? It’s a piss poor excuse for lazy organisations. It’s pretty lame for the virus to be trotted out as a reason, if everywhere else was shut ok, but they’re not, look around you. Fans need to visit the ground, it’s akin to a pilgrimage for some, if I shop over the retail park I very often walk over for a stroll around the ground. I love it, it’s part of me, sat on my settee tapping a key board is a poor substitute.
Anyone that doesn't have the means can use them for free in a library.
Anyone without an email can have one made for them by a helpful friend or family member in seconds.
If they want a season ticket those are the available options at the moment, you old lot just want things how you want them.
You can still walk there if you wish
Exactly, the club muddle through this then think ‘Hey, why have staff at all, let’s let them all go’, it’s not good the way things are going, staff in supermarkets pointing you to the self service tills when there are about twenty till points with nobody on them, don’t they realise they’re doing themselves out of jobs? We need staff to serve us, we need shops with human beings assisting us and, yes, we need our ticket office open and people employed there, we need a thriving, well stocked club shop needing plenty of staff to serve us who want to actually see what we’re buying instead of seeing it on a screen.
My Dad left school at fourteen, but I've always thought of him as an intelligent and practical man with a talent for things like DIY that he certainly didn't pass on to his eldest son! However, when, at the age of about fifty five, the old style video recorders became widely available, he just didn't have a clue and it was a standing joke that if he was the only one in the house when a programme was shown there'd be no point whatsoever in asking him to record it.
Although I daresay it might sound ridiculous to anyone under the age of, say, fifty, there are people around who are like my Dad was with video recorders when it comes to computers. I have a mate who's just turned sixty nine who just doesn't get them at all. He bought a tablet a few years ago and I can remember spending about three hours at his house before I moved up here taking him through the basics - I left feeling he'd be okay after that, but it soon became clear that what I had said to him went in one ear and out of the other. His tablet has now been chucked in a corner and ignored, while his mobile phone is just that, a device he can use for making and receiving calls only.
He bought a season ticket last year, but the only City matches he got to see were the ones that were shown on Sky, so his 200 and odd quid was spent on nothing and he wants confirmation that his money will be used to pay for his ticket for this season. However, as things stand, the only chance he has of getting an answer to that is if he writes to the club (I'm aware of one or two who have done that and received a reply, but my words to him when we discussed him doing that were "good luck with that, the season will probably have started by the time you get a reply").
My mate tells me that he knows of five or six people in the same position - he's lucky in one regard because he gets out and about a lot and has a pretty wide circle of friends, but loneliness for older people is increasingly an issue in this country and it doesn't take too big a leap to imagine that these older, lonely people do not have access to a computer. Again, is it too big a leap to imagine that for some going to watch the team they have supported all of their life play and meeting up with friends they've made down the years would be one of the highlights of the life they lead now?
Such people have been completely ignored by City's approach to selling season tickets this summer - it so obviously has been devised by young or middle aged adults who just cannot comprehend that anyone would not be online in this day and age.
Through my ties with the Trust, I know there are people at the club doing their best and going an extra yard to help try and sort individual cases out and, of course, allowances have to be made for the pandemic when it comes to things like furloughing, but, even so, the club's response to the challenges they have been set this year has not been good enough.
Over twenty years ago, I started working from home and, although the processes and software involved were in their infancy at the time, I was told by the finance people in the office that me working from home was saving myself and them money. Therefore, it seems amazing that there cannot be some sort of telephone contact with people at the club when it comes to purchasing season tickets - I would have thought that this should have been an absolute priority when it became clear that the ticket office was unable to open.
Bob, there will sadly always be cases like you explain where people aren't computer literate and don't have help, or at least not that they know of.
Without sounding too cuntish though, can the club really open their ticket office for something like a really tiny percentage of people? Have staff there on the off chance someone in need of help comes in?
Pubs by me are still closed because they don't have beer gardens and it isn't worth taking staff off furlough to open for 1 or 2 old men that watch the horse racing, they would rather be open, but it really isn't financially viable so they can't.
I was thinking more in terms of having telephone access for people like my mate. I appreciate that, relatively speaking, there aren’t many who fall into my mate’s category, but, in their way, they’ve been better supporters of the club in the last year than those of us who were at least able to watch streams of our home games - they paid their money and, as yet, have got very little in return, yet they’ve been virtually ignored by City in the last few weeks.
Also, at the moment probably all season ticket renewals will be people using full or part credit from last year, so there is little money coming in to the club to justify having the staff there. That may change, next week (?), when season tickets become available to all and the club get cash in.
You carry on. Jesus you've got it for me haven't you 😂
I don't think, in percentage terms, there are many people who
1. Don't have Internet access
2. Can't use the Internet
3. Have nobody who could help them
4. Can't make it to a library to use the free service
5. Have nobody to take them to the library to use the free service.
If those figures are out there (how the **** they would be is anyone's guess but hey ho ill play along)
If anyone has those figures I wanna know why I wasn't partnof the South Wales wide survey, I feel I've missed out.
Or are these figures in the same place you found the "grandparents buy the majority of kids football kits" figures?
It’s simple adding and taking away.
13500 season tickets sold last year, minus those that haven’t renewed = the mystical figure
No ones got it “in for you”, it’s just that you are finding it hard to open your other eye to help those supporters that are not as intelligent as you