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Buyers snapped up every last seat just seconds after
5,000 bleacher tickets for President-elect Obama’s inaugural parade went on
sale Friday. Sold for $25 through Ticketmaster, the tickets were gone
in under a minute, according to a spokesman for the company. Almost as soon as
the tickets went on sale, blocs of anything over a single seat were
unavailable, according to some who tried to buy them.
Albert Lopez, a Ticketmaster spokesman, said the company
can process 14,000 tickets per minute on its online system. A 2008
concert by AC/DC in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, sold out in
three and a half minutes, meaning the Inaugural tickets went at a faster rate.
Obama gave “truly a rock-star performance,” Lopez joked.
A spokesman for the inaugural committee stressed that
tickets are not necessary to attend the parade, and that those that went on
sale Friday were for bleacher seats.
Still, the number of tickets that went on sale were just
a quarter of the number of those made available during Pres. Bush’s second
inaugural in 2005, according to the Washington
Post.
The fourteen-block parade route, from the Capitol to the
White House, will open to the public at 7 a.m. on Tuesday.
More than 90 groups, from high school marching bands to a
NASA float and the entire student body of the Virginia Military Institute, will
participate in the country's 56th inaugural parade. Bands from both Barack and
Michelle Obama's high schools will be included.
About 1,300 groups applied to participate, which
organizers said was three times the number of applications for other recent
inaugurations.
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