Mritika Senthil | Downtowns are a scam

With Halloween now in the rearview, it’s safe to say that the scariest things at Penn this season were bumping into your Penn Marriage Pact match on Locust Walk, registering for a class with the maximum difficulty rating on Penn Course Review, and, in what might have been the worst-value purchase of the semester, trying to snag affordable tickets to Halloweekend downtown parties.

Halloweekend marks a seasonal stretch of high-volume parties in late October. Starting at least a week before Halloween, fraternities, sororities, and other student groups pack the lead-up with a series of off-campus downtown events at commercial venues, followed by fraternities running late-night afterparties in cramped townhouses.

But if Halloweekend proved anything, it’s that the students too hungover to hit back-to-back downtown parties made the best call.

Downtown parties are frequently oversold or at capacity, especially with an influx of eager first years. It’s not uncommon to arrive on time and still stand in a packed queue on the sidewalk for hours, missing half the party. The crowding isn’t just at the door, though. Inside, venues are filled wall-to-wall with people. Be ready to shove through sweaty throngs to get a drink or use the restroom.

There are only so many weekends when students are willing to pay triple digits for a party ticket, and only a few commercial venues in Philadelphia that regularly work with student groups, so what’s emerged is an oligopoly of events. On Oct. 30, Alpha Kappa Psi, Penn’s co-ed business fraternity, and the Tabard Society, a selective off-campus social group, both planned large Halloween-themed downtown parties — Workaholics and Dynamic Duos, respectively — for the same 10 p.m. time slot at the nightclub Roar Philly. 

Combined, these two events accounted for over 1,400 tickets sold, putting the oversell rate at roughly 154% of the venue’s 900-person capacity. In other words, organizers had already oversold Roar by nearly 500 people, with Dynamic Duos still listing tickets for sale. Even if every attendee didn’t show up, the numbers left no buffer for crowd control. There was a similar scheduling issue in 2024, when Roar cut Tabard’s event to make room for a second booking.

At the door, Roar’s security was reportedly “threatening to mace [attendees]” if they didn’t back away from certain areas, according to a Sidechat post. Some of these attendees also said that after midnight, the security guards started charging people extra cash at the door to get in, exploiting the ennui of those waiting in line. “How do I report the security guards at workaholics for making [people] pay to get in after midnight,” one student asked, while others demanded that the organizers issue full refunds.

But for those seeking refunds, the process offers little accountability. Ticketing platforms like Posh, a fraternity favorite, route refund requests to event organizers, who have 10 days to respond. Even if the organizers ignore or deny the request, escalation options leave the final decision in the organizers’ hands. Your only meaningful recourse is to contact your bank and initiate a chargeback, a process that typically takes several weeks and requires proof that you made a good-faith effort to get a refund from the organizer.

Yet even that approach becomes nearly impossible when the organizer listed on refund or chargeback claims isn’t the one actually running the event. Fraternities and the like frequently use shell companies to bypass Pennsylvania’s liquor license laws, which forbid student groups from charging admission to alcohol-inclusive events. During Halloweekend, for instance, Society Eight Prod officially organized Dynamic Duos in place of Tabard. Because many of these shell companies exist only on paper, their operations lack customer service channels, let alone any reliable contact information. 

Of course, the University’s Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life is partly responsible for pushing parties downtown. This semester — with guidance from Fire and Emergency Services, Facilities and Real Estate Services, Risk Management, and a new Community Care Team under University Life — Penn began enforcing a 100-person cap on every on-campus residential event. To enforce this limit, OFSL-appointed staff posted outside event spaces use handheld clicker counters to tally entries and exits. In past instances when campus police suspected overcrowding, they pulled fire alarms to clear venues. 

Any host that refuses to settle for a mid-party shutdown is bound to look elsewhere, and downtown parties are an easy escape hatch. However, although fraternities and organizers are cornered by Penn’s restrictions, they’ve also learned to take advantage of them. Downtown party tickets work on supply and delusion: The less there are, the more we convince ourselves that they’re worth a day’s paycheck.

Better alternatives don’t appear overnight, though, and they won’t appear at all unless we stop treating a bad deal like a baseline expectation. Any student-run downtown party should carry a standard addendum: no double-booking, no overselling past fire safety capacity, and partial refunds in the case of limited runtime. You shouldn’t pay for anything less, because odds are, you’re otherwise bankrolling a fraternity formal that you weren’t invited to.

MRITIKA SENTHIL is a College junior from Columbia, S.C. Her email is mritikas@upenn.edu.