LOS ANGELES — Miracles for sale. Price: $15,000 and likely climbing.

Demand for the Grateful Dead's July 3-5 farewell shows at Chicago's Soldier Field has been so staggering that by the time the public Ticketmaster deal went down on Saturday morning, secondary market sites like StubHub were offering single tickets for $1,000 and up, with some three-day packages going for as much as $15,000.

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It wasn't supposed to be this way, but hey, capitalism always finds new ways to skin the goat.

When the surviving members of the band announced the shows last month, Deadheads were cheered to hear that the old-fashioned mail-order system was back, too: Byzantine instructions, meant to separate 'heads from scalpers with No. 10 envelopes and index cards and postal money orders, were supposedly designed to gave fans a reasonable shot at a face-value ticket.

But after the ticketing team reported receiving nearly 400,000 pre-order requests via some 60,000 envelopes, the Ticketmaster date was pushed two weeks from Feb. 14 to give them time to sort through the crush. As Saturday's online sale approached, thousands of Deadheads who mail-ordered had received rejection letters, while others were still in the dark.

But a lucky few were notified before the weekend sale via email that their orders had been accepted:

Image: Screen shot courtesy of Megan Mulry.

What many didn't know was that Chicago Bears season-ticket holders, as part of their contract with the team and Soldier Field, had first dibs on seats — meaning thousands of well-to-do Chicagoans had the option of either seeing the historic shows for face value, or turning their hundreds of dollars into several thousands of dollars.

Like, several thousand:

And it's never been easier, with sites like StubHub, the largest secondary-market ticket seller, which charges a flat fee to the seller — who can list their tickets at whatever price they like. One StubHub agent, who declined to give his full name because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, told Mashable that he'd never seen higher prices for a show.

"I’ve been doing this nine years, and I would say this is going to be the biggest one I’ve seen," he said. "The Super Bowl is always going to be bigger than anything. But this is definitely the biggest concert. By far. By far."

And with good reason.

"These will be the last shows with the four of us together," founding guitarist Bob Weir told Billboard when the band announced the shows that would include him and surviving members Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann.

Standing in for Jerry Garcia, whose last show was at Soldier Field in 1995 a month before his death, will be Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio. Pianist Bruce Hornsby, who played with the Grateful Dead in the '90s, and Jeff Chimenti, who plays keyboard with Weir's side project RatDog, are also on board.

It is as enticing a lineup as the band has put out since Garcia's death — they've toured in a few different iterations as The Other Ones, Phil and Friends, Furthur, and just The Dead over the past 20 years — and combined with the declared finality, it's no wonder that some fans would be willing to spend several months' wages to be a part of it.

Even passes to the Soldier Field parking lot, where you can hear the music and enjoy the festive party scene (if not see anything), were being sold on StubHub for $200.

Other options include travel packages from companies like CID Entertainment, which was offering two different "experiences," including general admission tickets, ranging in price from $519 to $2,198.

And of course, as touring vets know, there's one final option — and it's been known to work: