We all know food costs too much at games.

But what if I told you this slice and this beer and these hot dogs are all part of an illegal scheme perpetrated by billionaires?

I'm used to outrageous prices, but this is just a special kind of hell. I'm at Madison Square Garden, not just for a mildly stale pretzel, but to meticulously catalog and quantify just how badly we're getting ripped off. All to prove a point.

We don't have to live like this.

Because there is something felonious about these franks and something we can do about it.

I should start with a story that, for months now, I've been obsessed with.

The story of a guy who was fed up with skyrocketing prices and unprecedented inflation.

Not today, but 1978, when a high school teacher named Ron Gordon waged a one-man war against the price of a hot dog.

And I think part of my obsession was this: there was something we've lost since Ron's day that held the secret for how we can bring down the skyrocketing cost of being a sports fan today.

I had to find him.

So I packed my bags for California to figure out what he knew and what he could teach us.

You haven't used the word crazy yet, that's good. I'm Ron Gordon, friend of Alec Opperman, who's out here from New York thinking, "what a mistake I made." In 1978, Ron caught wind that the price of a hot dog was going up by a nickel at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.

The reason? A new health ordinance mandating that vendors wrap their wieners. That nickel would pay for the labor and bring the total cost to $0.75.

But to Ron, the math seemed wrong. He became convinced that the concessionaire, the Stevens Company, was pulling a fast one on Giants fans, and the owner, Bob Lurie, had his hands in the profits. He called everyone. Ron, have you lost a little bit of sleep doing this? He called Stevens’ meat supplier, got quotes on the price of the Doboy wrapping machine. I lost a lot of sleep, I spent a lot of time. I spent, like, 300 hours on this thing.

What Ron discovered was that Stevens would recoup their cost and a whole lot more.

The total amount of money which they take in would be $91,000, which is an awful lot of money, there's no question. That's over $400,000 in today's money.

Ron took his beef to San Francisco's park and rec board, who could veto the price hike. One suspicious piece of math was just how fast Candlestick could wrap a hot dog.

They were wrapping 2.47 hot dogs per person per minute in 1978, and a year later, I guess they got some practice at it, slowed it down and they were only wrapping 1.6 hot dogs per person per minute. So Ron, in front of the parks board, proved them wrong.

I wrapped dogs while I was lecturing them about the wrong they were doing. You wrapped 12, and they could only wrap 2.7.

I know Rec and Park was irritated with me. The more elaborate I got, the less pleased they were.

I gave them every detail in every order that I had gotten from the Giants or from them.

I mean, they were waiting for me to finish and go away, and then they could leave the hot dog prices the way they were. Jack may be nimble, Jack may be quick, but the five cent bite continues here at Candlestick. Ron lost this battle, but the Wiener War wasn't over.

Because behind Ron's gambit was an understanding that his local government had the power, even the responsibility, to do something about this.

It started with who actually owns and pays for stadiums. In Ron's case, Candlestick Stadium was built using public money.

It's the same for many stadiums today.

Even after they're built, most stadiums get mountains of your taxpayer money because they claim they're a public good. Take, for instance, Madison Square Garden.

They get a special break on property taxes that has cost New York hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, most stadiums are exempt from property taxes.

And what are we getting in return for all the free money we're showering on billionaire stadium owners? A boost to the local economy?

Not really. Study after study finds they are a terrible deal. And do we get affordable tickets? Obviously not.

From 1999 to 2020, ticket prices grew twice as fast as inflation. One driver of the continued increases: dynamic pricing.

But billionaires get a great deal: a license to commit highway robbery at the ticket booth and concession stand.

Stadiums used to have shame.

The business culture across the board, not just in stadiums, has grown more craven, more opportunistic, more willing to take advantage.

$11.25 for a hot dog? A single hot dog? PSA, don't get the double vodka lemonade at Madison Square Garden.

It'll cost you $45. Ron’s $0.75 hot dog would, in 2025 dollars, cost you about $3.71.

Today, in the same city, you'd pay $9 at a 49ers game.

Consumed by this glizzy grift, I reached out to this guy you've heard from before. A lawyer and former government official who had some surprising news.

Charging too much for a hot dog in a stadium is already illegal under the prohibition on unfair practices,

which most states already have on the books. When you're in a stadium, you only have one choice.

And what that means is the stadium has effectively monopoly power over you.

These unfair and deceptive practice laws can be wielded right now by state attorneys general, or even the federal government, to bring down prices.

Regulators use them all the time for all kinds of behaviors that exploit consumers, like price gouging during natural disasters.

But I was skeptical. If it's so clearly illegal, why has nothing happened about this? Regulators and attorneys general have grown complacent.

They've gotten used to the high prices in stadiums, just like we have. I think it's just a lack of imagination, a lack of will.

Corporate America has realized that they can overcharge because enforcers aren't going to stop them. It's not just lawsuits.

State agencies across the country could write rules explicitly banning price gouging at the concession stand under these unfair practice laws.

But there's an even more direct solution. Those terrible public-private partnerships that owners love to exploit.

When I was reviewing Madison Square Garden’s own financial reports, something caught my eye. This line, under a section called Economic and Operational Risk.

The report highlights the danger of the government pulling their special zoning permits. They have to get renewed every 5 or 10 years.

And their $43 million a year tax exemption. Now, wouldn't it be a shame if the city asked for something in return?

Or any other city, for that matter? We seem to be one of the few countries, in fact, that finds sports price gouging acceptable.

In 2016, 10,000 Liverpool fans walked out of a match to protest £77 tickets.

They chanted to the team's American owners.

In 2025, according to The Athletic, the most expensive ticket is £61, about 80 US dollars.

My Knicks ticket alone cost $277. That's about the same as the average cost of an NFL ticket.

Meanwhile, many teams in the UK don't use dynamic pricing.

They use fixed prices by seat, something New York's mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed doing for the World Cup, where a finals ticket goes for $16,000 or more.

And in the UK, scalping is highly restricted. Others are picking up the Ron Gordon price fighting torch.

Lina Khan, the former FTC commissioner and current adviser to Zohran Mamdani,

promised to use New York City's unconscionable pricing laws to go after outrageous concessions.

Whether it's taxpayer dollars, use of public lands or just enforcement of existing laws, most American localities have leverage.

We should expect cities to demand conditions. One of them that they can be putting into all of these contracts is street pricing.

A hot dog at that cart is $5. Now you go inside and a hot dog is $9.50.

Street pricing is the idea that the price of a hot dog inside needs to be the same as the price of a hot dog outside,

which is the polar opposite of whatever Madison Square Garden is doing.

As the Groundwork Collaborative reports, street pricing with no markup has been implemented in Portland's International Airport.

And a few stadiums are already bucking the price gouging trend, and they're not going out of business any time soon. The point is, we have the power to stop price gouging,

even if our elected leaders pretend we can't, or won't. That's what the parks board tried with Ron. To shoo him away.

But sometimes officials just need a little public pressure. Or one dogged pursuer of justice. They brush you off.

What makes you want to keep going? Because I was right. They’re doing something wrong.

And if nobody's going to help you with that, then redouble your efforts and do some more. When the Parks board didn't take him seriously, Ron went to the press.

He took it national. He wrote and called anyone and everyone.

He got a letter from the White House, and economist Milton Friedman told Ron to spend his time more fruitfully. But besides the rebuke from a Nobel-winning economist, the pestering worked.

Sports Illustrated covered it a couple of times. The Wall Street Journal did it. Sport Magazine, CBS National News.

You sound like you're about to say, give me liberty or give me death. It's more a matter of give me fairness and give me my nickel. Ron's one-man crusade finally moved the parks board.

You wouldn't blame Californian Ron Gordon for shouting hot dog!

This week, San Francisco's Park and Recreation Board ruled that Gordon was right and they were wrong.

But he was one man fighting against one nickel in an unending march of rising prices.

Forty-seven years later, my total bill at Madison Square Garden was $638.53.

$555.60 was two tickets. And those were the cheap seats. And the other $87.93 was food.

For that much money, I could have gotten two roundtrip tickets to Spain, where you can get a beer at a game for under five bucks.

You might be thinking, what's the harm in a $15 beer? It's not an essential good. It's not, you know, your monthly bills.

But we all deserve to live in an economy where you're not just scraping by,

that you actually have a chance to have joy and be entertained and go to a sports game.

We can live in that world. We used to live in that world. Ron tried to keep that world alive just a little bit longer, but he did so at a huge personal cost.

Mostly phone bills. I spent over three grand fighting them on hot dog prices. Do you know what that is adjusted for inflation? Because I've done the math.

No, I'm not going to give a refund to my wife. It's $14,000. Ooh. How does that make you feel? Broke. Poor.

But it was an investment in justice. Ron hasn't been to a game in about 30 years. Even back then, the big money pouring into sports didn't sit right with him.

The heroes are in the stands. I mean, the heroes in society. So, yeah, I got tired of it. And yes, it did leave a bad taste in my mouth.

You told a reporter the more I knew about it and the less other people did about it, the more it became my responsibility. Do you remember saying that? No, but good for me. That's the truth.

I want you to know that much. Don't quit. To go make a difference for other people is important. I mean, I taught high school for 38 years,

hopeful of making it a better world. If you work in the food industry or sports, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at stories@perfectunion.us.

 Thanks for watching.