Broadway ticket surfing
The theatr app lets you buy and sell theater tickets in New York. In contrast to a ticket resale platform like StubHub, theatr forbids listing tickets for more than the price that you originally paid, which makes it feel like a neighborly platform where both people end up ahead. It has some fees, some buyer protections, blablabla. I have had a good experience in the few times I've used it as a buyer and seller[1] so far.
What I find very fun about it is that there is a last-minute deals section for tickets to events happening the same day. You can also set up push notifications to notify you whenever a ticket is sold, including filtering only for events happening today.
This enables a spontaneous approach to theatergoing where you can say: okay, I'm ambivalent over whether I see a show today. There are some shows I want to see, and some prices I'd be willing to pay for at icket (you can filter on "Tickets under $X"); if something comes up I'll go, and if not that's fine too. And then you can just browse the app or turn notifications on, and see if a show is in the cards or not.
I did this one day while just riding the subway. At each subway stop I'd check if any new listings were available (in the last few hours before a show, all of the last-minute cancellations start to get posted), knowing that if I got home without finding anything, I'd just stay home. I ended up finding a last-minute deal on tickets to Art (ok I later realized it was a reasonable price but not, in absolute terms, a blazing-hot deal like I thought. But it felt like a deal to me! Which is sort of the only thing that matters). I saw and enjoyed the show! It was delightfully serendipitous—I didn't even know about the show until I saw the ticket pop up—and decidedly a good way to spend the evening.
This "ticket surfing" is a fun option if you ever have flexible plans!
My one experience as a seller was when I woke up at 8:58am and remembered that & Juliet has digital rush tickets that become available at 9:00. So I tried my luck and was able to purchase a ticket, and then fell back asleep. When I fully woke up later, I remembered what I had forgotten in my groggy state, which is that I had conflicting plans for the time I'd just purchased a ticket for. I felt really silly, but was at least able to sell my ticket on the theatr app so that I only suffered a small loss for the mistake. ↩︎