Can we pause for a moment to reflect on the plight of the lowly Super Bowl ticket scalper? He toils thanklessly for his art and all he asks in return is that you pay him several thousands of dollars to watch a football game in which you probably have no personal stake. With heartless, penny-pinching fans taking a risk by purchasing their Super Bowl tickets through “legitimate” means, this year’s scalpers may be forced to sink to selling NHL or NBA tickets just to pay the rent.

One scalper tells NY Magazine he’s been making football fans’ dreams come true by selling them insanely overpriced tickets to a game that is available to watch for free just about anywhere in the world, but that the lack of interest in this year’s game has made it the “worst Super Bowl ever.”

“Nobody likes the cold weather, they always want a warm climate,” explains the veteran scalper, ignoring the fact that there have been Super Bowls in cold weather cities, just not outdoors, and that baseball stadiums in cold-weather cities have been selling out NHL Winter Classic games that are played outdoors in January. “Usually around this time I’d be up $20 to $30,000. Last year, New Orleans was beautiful — I made $40,000. New York, I don’t know why they did it. I’d be happy if I make $5,000.”

Did you hear that? He may only make a profit of $5,000. Assuming he’s been pounding the pavement trying to sell his tickets for a full 50-hour week, that means his hourly wage was only $100/hour. And we’re sure he’s going to pay taxes on whatever profits he makes.

As of right now, folks with $1,450 in their pockets can still get tickets via StubHub, which currently has more than 3,400 tickets available for Sunday’s game. And that’s only a fraction of the tickets that people are trying to sell on other sites or that scalpers are pushing on the streets of Manhattan

That’s a significant drop from a week ago, when the least expensive ticket was $2,700.

“They’re dropping, and they are dropping fast,” another old-timer ticket scalper tells NY Magazine. “It’s going to be freezing out there. The people I deal with, the brokers firm I work with, it was on the board for $3,000, now it’s half that.”

He admits that he did sell some tickets for $7,000 recently and that he has made $6,000 in commission thus far.

A third scalper predicts that gameday tickets will be sold at bargain-basement price.

“I believe these are going to go down to $500,” he claims, looking into his scalper’s crystal ball. “You’d wait until the day of the game, and then you’d go over there to the stadium.”

Or just watch the game from home and spend that money on really good food (or invest it for your retirement).

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