A millennial sued over Nats’ ‘Young Professionals’ discount. It vanished.
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Nick Snyder, born in 1983, is what demographers would call “an elder millennial.” But when he turned 40 last year, he no longer qualified for a “millennial” discount at D.C.’s Nationals Park.
Now, on Opening Day of the 2024 season, Snyder is suing the Washington baseball team in D.C. local court for age discrimination. He and a 58-year-old fellow fan say discounts on tickets, concessions and merchandise offered to fans ages 21 to 39 are a violation of D.C. law.
“We hope that the Nationals will abandon this irrational and unfair policy,” he said in a statement.
Within an hour, it appears they had. The promotion, renamed this year the “Young Professionals” discount, disappeared from the team website. A Nationals spokeswoman declined to comment on the change or on the litigation.
The lawsuit will still go forward, said plaintiff’s attorney and 30-and-up local league player Peter Romer-Friedman. In addition to a court ruling preventing any similar discounts in the future, the plaintiffs want the Nationals to compensate older fans who paid full price while these promotions were available. They are asking the court to let them represent as a class all fans over 40 who were deprived of a discount ticket.
If successful, the suit could imperil age-based offers at entertainment venues across the city. The D.C. Human Rights Act, first passed in 1977, is one of the broadest in the country. Age is one of the 23 protected traits, which also include political affiliation, personal appearance and place of residence. Someone could also try to sue over “local” promotions that offer discounts to people who live in a certain part of the city. (The Nationals also offer D.C. residents a chance at $5 tickets to home games.)
Many of the major performing arts companies in D.C. offer discounts aimed at enticing a younger audience. (For the Washington National Opera, that means anyone 40 and under). In 2011, the D.C. Office of Human Rights issued an “advisory opinion” suggesting theaters expand discounts to all ages but said it had no plans to take legal action. John C. Good, executive director of Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, said that none of the 2,000 requests for legal help his group had fielded from local arts organizations involved an age discrimination suit over such promotions.
Dennis Corkery, senior counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights and Urban Affairs, said D.C.’s age discrimination law is unusual in that it was not aimed specifically at the elderly; anyone over 18 is protected. “I’ve never seen any lawsuit like this,” he said, but “it certainly looks like there’s a viable claim.”
In addition to accusing the Nationals of illegal age bias, this suit says the team is on the hook for “material misrepresentations that violate the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act” - specifically, falsely claiming last year that “millennials” would qualify for the discount. While the name changed, in both years the discount of 30 percent off regular-season home-game tickets and a spending credit of between $5 and $15 per ticket for concessions was available only to fans over 20 and under 40.
Whatever it’s called, the plaintiffs said there’s no reason to offer a discount to a 39-year-old who makes $400,000 a year but not a 55-year-old who earns $50,000. They suggested a team valued at roughly $2 billion could afford to simply reduce ticket prices across the board.
While the promotion is gone, that recommendation does not appear to have been taken up. “We stand ready to work with them to ensure that there are equivalent discounts provided to people irrespective of their age in the future,” Romer-Friedman said.
He brought the suit with Ryan A. Hancock, a Philadelphia-based attorney.
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Andrew Golden contributed to this report.
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