But even back in the day, scalpers were gaming the system. When I was in HS in the late 90s, I had a friend who has a friend who was one of those "ticket brokers" you'd see I'm the classified ads. This dude would recruit a small army of teenagers like my buddy to buy tickets in large quantities at as many outposts as possible.

One Saturday morning, my buddy had us join in. So owner dude would give us each am envelope of cash and specific instructions on what to buy, plus like an extra $100 for our time. We'd each go to a different grocery store that had the Ticketmaster counter an hour before ticket sales started. Wait in line and buy as many of whatever we could get as possible, based on his hierarchical list. I remember me and a friend each buying 8 tickets to the WWF show, and by the time the mom and young kids got to the counter, all dates were sold out. Felt like such a piece of shit that I never did it again.