To be irritated by this?

[Friendsschmenda]

Friends Alice, Betsy and Charlie are going to an event together. Charlie mentions his friend has a spare ticket for the event and both Alice and Betsy express an interest.

Betsy frequently buys tickets from reselling tickets and has lots of contacts within this route. Alice doesn’t but is happy to buy hers online from a legal reseller.

Charlie then says that his friend’s ticket is £50 and Betsy immediately says great I’ll have that. Alice sees the message 5 minutes later and says that she’s also keen to go - is there another being sold? There isn’t and she expresses disappointment as she has seen messages on reselling sites selling the tickets for £100.

Alice sends a slightly irritated message to Charlie saying that she wishes Betsy had told her she was going to get the cheap ticket - as they were both interested and maybe they could have split the difference.

Who is BU?

You snooze you lose.

Alice is BU.

Snooze lose

You must be Alice if you're irritated about it. YABU.

Ok yes I am Alice actually. Reason I’m annoyed is we both said we’d like the ticket and if it was me who’d got there first I would have said, I’d love to take it, hope that’s ok with you Betsy! And then offered to help look for her

Agree with this

Alice is unreasonable. There’s one ticket available, why should the person who answers second get it at the expense of the one who answered first?

You're being ridiculous.

Snooze you lose! Alice is being unreasonable.

And if you'd got there first and said to Betsy "I hope thats OK?" and Betsy said no. Then what?

If I was Betsy I would have split the difference

This. It's all very well saying you'd have said "is that ok?"- what if betsy had said NOOOO it's not ok with me at all- what would you have done then?

First come first served I'm afraid. You arent a child and Betsy doesnt owe you money or to coddle you because of the sake of £50 difference.

Alice is being massively unreasonable and a bit ridiculous. I’d be embarrassed by that behaviour.

Ok that’s fine but as a PP said I would have split the difference.

Alice is unreasonable. Betsy got there first, that’s all there is to it. Alice can’t now get stroppy because she didn’t get her way.

Point taken, I do get it! I would’ve handled differently but I do understand. IABU 😅

Its easy to say that after the fact.
Talk is cheap

@Friendsschmenda this is way too much of an overthinking type approach to life. Honestly 99.9% people I’m pretty certain would just bag the deal asap and then get on with their day. They wouldn’t thereafter be reaching out to their friend, offering to look for them also, then split the difference blah blah blah 😅

I know that because I was once the naive people pleasing eejit that did these things and got walked all over as it became apparent most people are Betsys 😅

I think the difference here is they had both previously expressed interest in the ticket.

fairest thing to do (and if I were Charlie I would have suggested this) would be as OP and PP have said to split the total cost of the two tickets and both help look for the second

Should have said I'll definitely buy it off you to start with, not I'm interested, and who said they were interested first?

Alice sounds like she thinks she's entitled to the ticket because she will only use official sites whereas Betsy will find someone else selling independently

If I were Betsy I'd buy Alice a drink at least, but hopefully everyone will still have a good time.
You are still going right?

1. If you are all going together, you should have your official tickets already
2. If you didn't then you are always going to get fleeced, the question is by whom
3. Nothing has changed intrinsically. You were going to go to an official reseller. She was going to go to a third party/direct seller. The latter always holds a risk whether it's a friend if a friend or not
4. Not up to the other friend to mediate or decide. What possibly should have happened should have been: here's my friend's details if you want the ticket. She possibly/probably would have beaten you to it in any case