Ticket Station

Ticket Station, originally uploaded by hearsedrv.

The Ticket Station.

This is were you gave up your ticket and got "IN"

Did I mention that 99% of all people working at burning man are volunteers? they are. You can volunteer for anything from Ticket taker to a Real DR. they need everything. and its amazing how many volunteer. more volunteer than opening are available.

I volunteered for Greeters but they didnt need anymore. The greeters shifts were 4 hours each about 25 per shift 24 hours a day from Saturday until Friday at midnight and they were full on volunteers about mid June!

Whats great about everyone being a volunteer is you could come dressed as you wanted (one of the greeters not the ticket takers was not wearing anything..more on that next time) so you could come dressed how you wanted and if you wanted to sit down you just did. If you wanted to act crazy they did.

Now the ticket takers did take there job serious but they had fun with it. Its not like they could get fired! Sure they could be told that there services were not needed anymore but you wouldnt care since you were not getting paid anyway!
They searched our truck for stow aways and said go on in! that easy!

now tickets...I bought my ticket for 175 bucks on Jan 5th at 1pm central time when they went on sale. the ticket structure is set up this way.
the first 10,000 tickets were 175
the next 10,000 were 200
the next 5,000 were 225 and after that they were unlimted number at 250.
you dont get anything diffrent with each kind of ticket. they all just admit one person. No ticket sold after friday night and no more admited either. if your not in by friday before the man burns your out!

for the cost of the ticket you get to come in and use the port a poties and thats about it as far as what they supply.
since its on federal land they have to pay the Govt for each person that is onsite each day. I think its about 4 bucks a person per day. I was there 8 days so that was 32 bucks. then they have to have porta poties that the federal gov deems adequate.
I will say they were very adequate as far as porta poties go. fig thats about 40 bucks for my share.
then they have to bring in electricity for center camp, build the man, buy supplies to build the street signs, greeters station, ticket takers fence cones etc.
they also give away several hundred thousand dollars in art grants. anyone can apply for one.
they dont make money on the event.
they make about 7 mill on tickets and spend every bit of it.

think of this, if they wanted to get Budwieser to sponser the event they could. An easy estimate would be ok Bud you pay us 3 million dollars and you can be the official beer, plus we get one buck off each beer sold. an easy estimate of the take would be in the 10 million dollar range. so they drop the ticket price to say 75 bucks, and bring in 10million off beer sales alone! But the whole idea is none commercialzation, so they dont. one of the biggest reasons I went! I didnt have budweiser in my face all week saying buy me! or any other vendor. I did have people say "want a beer?" as they hand it to you and walk away, not expecting anything in return!

ok so anyway, they have taken our ticket and we next goto the greeter station....