So you want to indulge and get off the couch. You want to take your family to the stadium to see an NFL Football game. You’re American, after all, and the kids have already been to Disney. Warning: be prepared to sit there in your seat while nothing happens. That’s the first shock of the live NFL action–the long, long waits between any sort of actual NFL action. At home you don’t notice it because you’re either watching or ignoring the billions of dollars of commercials that pay for the program. But at the stadium, while those commercials are on, nothing happens. So you run to get a beer. In St. Louis that beer will cost you just $4.50–cheapest in the league. But if you’re in Oakland or San Francisco, that beer will be more than $10. And these prices are for the smallest beer you can get. (Wow, Oakland: even Dan Snyder’s Redskins only charge $9 for a beer.)
Thank goodness for those commercials, right? If it weren’t for those, the tickets to the game would cost a fortune. Wait, they cost a fortune anyway? Even though the NFL just signed a $27 billion TV contract? According to TeamMarketing.com (which also supplied the beer prices), taking a family of four to a 49ers game will cost you $641.50. It’s $634.80 in Dallas. That’s with a “non-premium” ticket price of $117, second behind the New England Patriots “non-premium” $122 average. The average NFL ticket in 2014 is $84.43. And the average family of four cost is $479.11, up 4.4 percent from 2013. The median weekly earnings of the nation’s full-time wage and salary workers was $780 in the second quarter of 2014, according to the US Department of Labor.
