KEY POINTS:
The customer is always right, unless he or she is a patron at Eden Park.
This week's ticket booth schemozzle at the NZ-England Twenty20 cricket match was painful in every respect. For those who queued outside just two open ticketing counters as the match ran through the start of the first innings. For the cricket officials who underestimated the interest in a night of international sport on a glorious summer evening. And for the park's trust board chief, Murray Reade, who, in effect, blamed the customer for the bottleneck.
No sign of a "sorry", just a mild telling-off for those daring to arrive around the start time and, worse, a questioning of the patrons' level of experience attending Eden Park.
This "new patron" unfamiliar with idiosyncrasies such as queues stretching out into the night while the match is already under way might not appreciate what he called the "challenge of Eden Park".
The real challenge for Eden Park is to show that it is a flexible, customer-oriented, multi-sport venue.
If it stages a sports match starting after work hours and after dinner, then most people will complete both of those things before going along.
If it knows it has sold a number of tickets electronically, then how hard can it be to have adequate staff to dispense them? (It could not have been a surprise that the number who bought tickets turned up to use them.)
And if it cannot open more counters like every half-decent supermarket, it needs to review its staffing budget.
Finally, if it cannot say "sorry" when thousands have been inconvenienced, it risks discouraging patrons, old and new, from countenancing the Eden Park "challenge" in future.
