Should the friend get the money back for her ticket even if she made no attempt to sell it herself?
Every time a group of friends plans something together, one person ends up initially paying for the whole thing. They act like they are fine with it, while they silently pray that everyone will pay them back without being chased. Whether it is concert tickets or a restaurant bill, it’s much easier to have one person pay and for the rest to pay them back their portion.
At least it’s easier on paper. In real life, there are always complications. There is always the one friend who never pays back, or someone who suddenly backs out of plans and demands their money back. Suddenly, the person who paid becomes a part of a dramatic fallout they never planned, simply because they were kind enough to offer to put their card down first.
This brings us to the dilemma in the story below. A husband and wife planned to go to a concert with a friend, so the husband bought tickets for all of them. The friend paid him back in cash.
A day before the concert, the friend suddenly backed out of going. Since the physical ticket was in the husband’s hands, he offered the friend to come over and take it so she could try to sell it, but the friend was not interested in doing so. For all she cared, the ticket could be thrown away and go to complete waste. The husband, on the other hand, didn’t want to give up so easily. This led him to find a buyer himself and sell the ticket, and so he did. He made the deal and sold the friend’s ticket all by himself.
Since he was the one who did all the work, the husband thought it was only fair that he would keep the money from the sale. It didn’t matter to him that the friend already paid him back for the ticket; he wanted the profit from the sale itself, since it was his initiative to sell it in the first place. However, his wife thinks it’s not the right move and that the money should return to the friend who still technically owns the ticket.
Should the husband keep the money, or give it back to the friend?
