PNC is still a decent venue but some things in recent times have made me enjoy them less than I used to.

For one thing, for lawn seating you can no longer bring your own chairs. Why? Well my best guess is that they really want people to rent a chair for the night from them.

Problem is, the price to rent a chair is the price one can buy a decent portable folding seat! ($15!) And when you buy, that's a one time fee - this is per show! Over the course of a summer it would be very easy to spend well over $100 on chair rentals!

I thought okay guess that's just the new going rate! Until I went to an outdoor venue up the road in Raleigh and saw their chair rentals there are $6! For $6 it's totally worth not having to carry a chair in, for $15, no thanks, I'll stand or find something else to sit on!

Now the other drawback here is that you can buy a decent seat in a front section even, but if you are not in the front row of the section you will not be able to see the stage AT ALL! Why? Well they have zero restrictions on people standing and holding their phones over their head (or stupidly, a bit higher than just in front of their faces, basically watching the show thru a tiny screen! Lol!)

They supposedly restrict selfie sticks but people still bring and use them too (honestly those are less intrusive than holding with arms! The sticks take the phones higher up and do not block view nearly as much!)

Recently, I had an $89 seat I bought on a presale that I was quite happy with - until the show started and I realized I could not see a thing, from any angle, seated or standing. All I could see was a sea of phones! I could barely even see the show on the screens! Very quickly I gave up my $89 seat and headed for the lawn so I could actually see the show! I really wish they would go back to the days when even taking a few photos during a show was frowned upon!

Also about seating - even when a show has tons of empty seats, it seems seat upgrades are just no longer available. You used to be able to purchase a seat upgrade both on site and also online ahead of time.

Now you have to arrive there, find the upgrade booth, scan the QR code, view the available upgrades, choose one, attempt to check out - only to get all kinds of errors. When showing this to persons at upgrade booth, the standard answer seems to be, "oh yeah, I guess there's no more available! Others have been getting that message too!" Or, "oh they must be sold out!" (Even when there's a ton of empty seats to be seen!)

I do want to mention one extremely positive thing from just the other night at the Imagine Dragons show - There was a guy working at one of the booths near the entrance who was extremely helpful, friendly and gave excellent directions! I WISH I had got his name! It was a PNC booth that was on the right side, not far past the entrances if one came in and turned right immediately.