Plus: Crypto, but in English...
Tonight: It's the Swifties versus Ticketmaster, and it's not pretty. Plus: The buck-fifty hot-dog-soda combo just met its match. Let's get into it. By Allison Morrow | |
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It's you, Ticketmaster. Hi. You're the problem, it's you. The Swifties were all fired up today as pre-sales began for a handful of Taylor Swift's shows. But when they logged in to Ticketmaster to buy them, the site began crashing, freezing and/or funneling fans into a queue that appeared to never move forward. Taylor Swift's superfans were, to say the least, not happy. A sampling of the outrage: Ticketmaster initially told my colleague Jordan Valinsky that the "site is not down" and that "people are actively purchasing tickets."
Then it issued a follow-up, saying that "there has been historically unprecedented demand with millions showing up" to buy tickets for Swift's tour. It told customers waiting in the queue to "hang tight."
You know, I'm no expert but it does sorta seem like Ticketmaster might have anticipated that the singer who held every slot in the Billboard Top 10 just a couple of weeks ago might, you know, have a lot of fans? On top of that, Swift hasn't toured since 2018. That means the Swifties have been deprived of a live show for the better part of four years. You'd think it would have come up in a meeting, sometime, somewhere, over at Ticketmaster HQ. At the end of the day, though, fans don't have any choice but to wait a little longer, and Ticketmaster has no incentive to do better next time because of that whole monopoly thing. It's frustrating. My solution to this dilemma is I that I only listen to music made between the early 1990s and late 2000s, and refuse to attend events where large crowds of youths are likely to gather. It's a life hack that everyone over the age of 30 should try. |
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| The hot-dog-and-soda combo is practically an American institution, and big-box rivals Sam's Club and Costco have long offered the combo at the unbeatable price of $1.50. Unbeatable until now, anyway... In a world of endlessly rising prices, Sam's just dropped the cost of its combo to $1.38. That's quite a deal. Your move, Costco. |
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| I know it's been a crypto-heavy newsletter lately, but the FTX saga just keeps unfolding with shocking developments. See here: - FTX, the crypto exchange that went bust last week, could now have more than 1 million creditors (most of them FTX customers) to face in bankruptcy court, my colleague Matt Egan reports.
- On top of that, lawyers for the company said in court filings that FTX has been in contact with "dozens" of regulators around the world.
- Meanwhile, the company's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is apparently still trying to secure cash in the hopes of repaying FTX's customers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And according to Bloomberg, authorities from the US and the Bahamas (where FTX is based) have been discussing the possibility of bringing Sam Bankman-Fried to the US for questioning. Which isn't a huge surprise, given the scale of the damage FTX has caused, but it's notable. Bottom line: All of this is more bad new for Bankman-Fried, who at just 30 years old has managed to build a $32 billion empire that cratered in the span of a week. It's a colossal failure, and the full scope of the damage is still not clear. RELATED: Pssst. Hey. So, it's 2022 and crypto is all over the news but, like, a lot of people don't really understand what it is. That's nothing to be ashamed of because crypto is, in fact, pretty hard to explain in plain English. I've spent the past 24 hours trying to do that. Here it is, if you're curious. |
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📈 US stocks rose Tuesday after the US government reported that wholesale prices rose at a far less dramatic rate than expected. That news come just a few days after another report showed that the pace of consumer price increases was also slowing.
⚖️ The Labor Department is suing food sanitation company, accusing it of employing dozens of children in hazardous jobs on overnight shifts at various food processing plants.
🐦 Elon Musk has publicly clashed with Twitter employees about the state of the platform, and fired at least one of them in a tweet — an unusually visible sign of corporate chaos. |
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