A few days ago, I went to Sawai Mansingh Stadium to watch an IPL match between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians.
This was the first match I was going to watch live in stadium and I was very excited. We watched the players very closely, it was a tight contest and Rajasthan winning it was the icing on the cake. So all and all it was a great experience but there was this thing which made me feel disgusted.
Whenever we go to a mall or a stadium, we expect the food prices to be very expensive so I was already expecting it. I had a heavy lunch cum dinner at 5 p.m. The match was scheduled to start at 8 p.m. We bought a couple of water bottles with us but were soon notified that the guards would not let us to take the bottles inside due to security purpose(as there have been an issue of people throwing bottles inside the stadium). Even this thing made sense so we were ok with it.
We asked the guard if we will have water inside and he said yes.
So we entered the stadium and took our seats, had fun for around 30–40 minutes. Just before the match was about to start, I went to drink water to ensure that I don’t need to leave the match in between. So I came out of the stadium and kept asking the guards about water and they kept on saying k “aage milega”(U will get it ahead). I finally reached the place. There were lot of small stalls and I asked them about water and they said that I need to buy it from them. There is no free water available here. I was shocked. There were thousands of people inside the stadium and the match being played in April(most in May as well) when the weather is hot, it was obvious that everybody will require water.
The most disgusting thing was that you can still not take the bottle inside the stadium so you have to either buy it for double the cost and drink as much water as u can in one go or they also had an option of filling a glass with normal water(not chilled) for Rs 10.
Just imagine thousands of people drinking water for double the price in just 3 hrs. I have seen these sort of tactics being played on food but this was the first time I saw something like this with water. We can someway control our hunger but it is quite hard to control your thirst for around 4–5 hrs especially in that humid temperature.
It was almost a full house so imagine there were 20k(23k is their capacity) people in the stadium.
Lets believe that only 15k out of them drank water that also only once.
Out of 15k, lets believe some were sharing water from the same bottle so take 1/3rd the number.
So at least 5000 bottles were bought that night.
5000x40= 2,00,000
That bottle would have hardly cost them Rs 10. So they earned a profit of Rs 150,000 in that one particular night only through water.
I have not included the water they were selling for Rs 10. That did not cost them anything so whatever they sold was their profit.
How is that for a tactic?
