When you book a hotel room, you pay less for a view of the dumpsters than you do for a view of the ocean, right? And when you buy a house, its costs less for the one in BFE than for the one that’s close in, correct? And if you want a ticket to Austin’s Paramount Theatre, you’ll save money if you buy a seat in the nosebleed section instead of one from which you can actually see the stage, right?

Well, two out of three isn’t bad.

Last week I got an e-mail from the Paramount advertising a show by comic Bob Saget. You may remember Saget from “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” or perhaps the movie, “The Aristocrats.” Tickets were $35 no matter where you sit; front row, mezzanine or back row of the balcony, they were all $35. If the Paramount had a parking lot, I imagine they’d be the same price there, too.

Back in the day when I was still going to lots of big rock shows, they called this kind of one-price-fits-all arrangement “festival seating.” It worked back then because everyone was too high to realize that some seats are more desirable than others; we just heard “festival” and that’s all we needed. “Whoa, dude – festival seating! It’s just like Woodstock or … uh … Woodstock! Far out, man.”

I called the Paramount to ask about this seeming incongruity and I was told that “single-pricing structure,” as it’s known, is the industry standard. The logic behind it, as it was explained to me, is that it discourages people from hesitating. Buy early and you get a good seat; buy late and you end up fighting over the armrest with a mountain goat.

Thirty-five bucks seems steep to me, and that price doesn’t count the $6.50 that gets tacked on as a “handling fee;” it does, however, include ropes, oxygen tanks and a team of sherpas to guide you to your seat.

The only time I can think of that a seat near the back would be at a premium would be if Rick Perry invited you to his inauguration party; with Ted Nugent as musical guest, you can’t get far enough away. I don’t know what makes the Nuge act the way he does but if there’s any chance it’s contagious, I’m happy to sit with the sherpas.