A Broadway Opening In London

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"It was a matter of survival," 63-year-old Arthur Golden remembers. After a string of business failures, he and his wife, Gladys, had set up a sightseeing stand in New York's teeming Penn Station train terminal. But that operation was on the verge of going under. "One hundred thousand people pass through here daily," the couple reasoned. "We have to be able to sell them something." They decided to sell theater tickets.

So they began a business that would grow from a mom-and-pop operation to a $165 million business selling more than 2 million tickets a year and change the way Americans buy tickets. By the end of 1976, 18 months after Golden and his wife founded Chargit, credit card telephone sales accounted for a mere 2% of theater tickets marketed in New York; this year credit card telephone sales acconnt for 25% of the market, and by 1987 the figure is expected to reach 90%. Now Golden is trying to export his ground-breaking idea to London.

In retrospect, Golden's innovations seem simple. Why, he asked himself, shouldn't individuals have the same freedom to order by phone that ticket brokers customarily give to corporate accounts?

The problem Gidden encountered was not with consumers but with the theater owners themselves. "That's because theaters are really part of the carnival tradition," he explains. "Their attitude was 'get the sucker's money.' " In December 1974, however, the Westbury Music Fair agreed to run Golden's phone number in its ads and to honor his credit card sales. Golden and his wife began to work four new phones set up in the tiny back room of their agency, and Chargit was born.

Today Chargit is thriving. The back room has grown to 20,000 square feet of offices with 200 employees staffing a 24-hour, $1.2 million phone system serving New York, its suburbs, and 23 cities across the country. Besides Westbury, Chargit offers tickets for such attractions as Broadway and off-Broadway shows, boxing and ballet, the Yankees and Mets baseball, Forest Hills tennis, Wolf Trap concerts, and the American Shakespeare Theater.

For the past two years Golden has been planning the move to London, the second largest theater market in the world. "It's been frustrating, though," Golden says. "Although we all speak English, the British actually speak a different language. They answer you in terms of 'we'll see' rather than a definite answer." Although his progress has been slowed by politics and procrastination, the business should be in place by the first of the year and fully operational, doing about half the volume of his New York office, within 12 months.

London is just the beginning. Paris, Chicago, and Los Angeles are Golden's next targets. And in the long run, he hopes to expand his business into marketing, using home computers and other forms of communication to sell not only tickets but also hotel and restaurant reservations.