“Large” and “small” sizes hold the same amount of beer and have $3 price difference
Anybody that has ever attended a professional sporting event knows that just about every purchase made after the ticket can be described anywhere from “slightly marked up” to “highway robbery.” For every sports fan that has ever felt ripped off, justice is being served to an arena that not only charges a lot for a beverage, but also allegedly misleads customers as to how much beer they are really getting.
A group of Idaho Steelheads hockey fans are suing the teams’ home arena, CenturyLink, for misleading them to believe that there was a difference in volume in the arena’s $4 ‘small’ and $7 ‘large’ beer sizes, and doing so knowingly in order to defraud fans.
The lawsuit has sprung up in the wake of a video posted to Youtube by another Steelheads fan, Gwen Gibbs, in which her boyfriend demonstrates by pouring the contents from the “large” beer glass into an empty “small” container, which both prove to hold the same amount comfortably.
Defendants Brady Peck, Michele Bonds, and William and Brittany Graham are seeking $10,000 in damages to compensate for what they claim to be many years of loyal attendance at the CenturyLink Arena, which hosts concerts and basketball games as well as Steelheads hockey games.
In the lawsuit, Peck claims that he has attended at least 30 events over the last three years at CenturyLink Arena, while the other defendants all claim that they have been attending sporting events at CenturyLink for five years and have purchased beer each time they attended.
Further, in the lawsuit, the defendant’s lawyer Wyatt Johnson claims that while the cups are different in shape, they are essentially identical in volume, and alleges that the arena knew this yet chose to continue duping their fans into emptying their wallets for nothing.
Following the YouTube video and the subsequent legal action brought against CenturyLink, Eric Trapp, president of both the arena and the Steelheads hockey team, issued a statement on the team’s Facebook page, denying any knowledge of the scam.
Trapp’s Facebook post reads: “It was recently brought to our attention that the amount of beer that fits in our large (20-oz) cups also fits in our regular (16-oz) cups. The differentiation in the size of the two cups is too small. To correct that problem, we’re purchasing new cups for the large beers that will hold 24 ounces, instead of 20, for the remainder of this season to provide better value to our fans.”
This post, which has garnered ninety-six different comments since its posting on March 10, shows Trapp using a rather ambiguous air to try and deny culpability for the deception.
Many of those that have commented on the post have expressed their interest in either seeing the money refunded to customers, or an equivalent dollar amount being donated to a charity, citing an act like this as the only way in which the arena might regain the trust it has lost.
As any of us who attend sporting events can probably agree – we know full well going into it that the concessions, especially the beer, are going to be overpriced. However, for the love we have for the game, we generally agree to silently seethe while being separated from our hard earned money, justifying it as an enjoyable break from every day life. I have a feeling that things would change a great deal were we to discover that not only are we being over-charged, but that we’re also being underserved.