In a similar vane to the post above - a lot of museums have annual passes. These passes not only give you exhibits to their own museums, but through reciprocity, dozens of museums around the country. Before the days of the Internet, this wasn't a big deal. Most people would buy the pass at their local museum, and occasionally visit museums out of town.
Once these passes became available over the Internet, a weird sort of arbitrage happened. People would find the cheapest pass in US that gave them local reciprocity, and then use that pass to go to their local museum fairly regularly. For example, if you live in NJ, and your kids like Liberty Science Center. The LSC pass might have been $200. But a pass for a kids museum in Fort Lauderdale is $100, and includes reciprocal entry to the LSC. So you buy that pass online, and then keep going to LSC, saving yourself $100 a year.
Is that ethical?
BTW, I know that in the last decade or so, museums have now restricted these passes in one or more of the following ways:
- You can only buy a pass if you are local to the museum that you are buying it from
- You can only use one reciprocal visit per year
- When getting admission to the reciprocal museum, you need to prove you live more than 100 miles away.