There were also contract workers who have been paid all along. They are owed money as well for unpaid hours.
Just to say what many of us are surely thinking: I’m sorry to you, to the event, and to any and all who were connected to it and hurt by these circumstances. I have no reason to believe that any of this was borne out of anything but good faith.
My last career was in Logistics. I had to choreograph pretty complex and international stuff, and that shit … is hard. You have to kid yourself, every single day, that you have a fair measure of control. “Man makes plans, and God laughs.” That’s Logistics.
There are long-ass lead times. Think of merchandisers who manufacture/source internationally, particularly in an environment when ocean freight is sketchy and expensive (since COVID, and – literally – possibly even with the Baltimore bridge incident).
Samples and dies and molds and freight and QC …
And that’s when your checks do clear.
Get some rest, @hajario . I’m quite certain you’ve earned it.
I was a volume manufacturing engineer so I am certainly aware of that. There was a whole lot of lack of due dilligence from what I have gathered. And there’s where the legal issues come into play. There was nothing but good intent but what should have been known.
I was very close to being involved on the very inside of the planning and logistics of this and I am glad now that it fell through.
I wish I could answer your question, but I’d rather not disclose anything relating to payments. I hope you understand.
May I ask why you were asked not to play any shows on a week either side of the festival? If that’s confidential, I understand.
Understandable. Sorry this concert fell apart (for you and others).
It’s typical for festivals to have a proximity clause for bands. A certain number of attendees are going to see a particular band. If they are playing right before or right after, they will see the solo show rather than seeing them at a festival. It’s so as to not hurt festival attendance.
If you pay attention, you’ll see that bands won’t announce their tour until after they have played a major fest for example.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
That’s sad to hear. The 2022 S&R was part of my honeymoon, so the festival has a special place in my heart. Sorry that this mess has been hard for you and everyone else involved.
Eventbright has released a statement that the refund window will be open until May 10th and although they aren’t legally resposible, they are going to do the right thing and try to get something out of Skull & Roses LLC and possibly Chris. This squares with what we have speculated and makes sense. They have done the impossible and gotten people to feel sympathy for a ticketing agency.
On the bright side, a lot of the local bands and musicians from other bands who are here anyway are putting on a variety of free events in the area over the weekend.
Kudos to Eventbright for this decision! I assume this statement has been emailed to the ticket holders? It’s unfortunate that the festival website still says nothing about this. I hate to think that some people might miss out on the refund because they’re only going by what the website says.
Great also that the bands are doing free events, so the attendees will still get to hear some music. Are the bands footing the bill for the venues that they’ll be playing at? That’s extremely generous of them to lose even more money than they’ve already lost due to the festival cancellation.
People are playing free shows in bars or parking lots. There will be some ticketed shows. A lot of things are being worked out behind the scenes and not announced yet.
Would you mind linking to that? Since googling “eventbrite skull and roses refund” links to nothing but the original statement that’s still on skullandroses.com, and various news articles indicating there will be no refunds. At least one friend of mine with tickets says he’s heard nothing whatsoever about a refund.
Have them start with this link.
Here is one of many updated news articles saying that refunds are being issued. Just reading the headline won’t get you the information
https://www.sfgate.com/culture-events/article/grateful-dead-festival-cancels-no-refunds-19397868.php
“ But on April 10, disappointed ticketholders began posting that Eventbrite, the ticketing service being used for the festival, was offering refunds through an online request form. A statement from Eventbrite emailed to SFGATE on April 12 explained that “event creators manage their own refund policies and are responsible for issuing refunds directly to ticket holders,” but continued: “In this instance, Eventbrite has opened a refund window for the event, despite not holding any proceeds from it. We’re refunding out of pocket while we work on recovering funds from the event creator.”
The statement indicated the refund window would be open until May 24.”
Well, I’m somewhat less impressed with Eventbright’s response than I was earlier. So they didn’t email anything directly to ticket holders, and they didn’t announce anything publicly, but merely replied to SFGate’s query? Are they relying on ticket holders finding the information buried in news articles published by media? The “Request a refund” link is also generic and doesn’t say anything about Skull & Roses, and if I were reading it as a ticket holder, it would not be at all clear to me that this case meets the complicated and confusing refund criteria. (It says I need to request a refund from the organizer before applying to Eventbright.) And how would the average ticket holder find that Request a refund link in the first place? If the S&R website says there are no refunds, it would not occur to me to go to Eventbright for a second opinion. It seems to me that a lot of ticket holders are going to miss the refund if that’s all they’re doing.
In my last gig, we worked closely with FedEx. They sent one of their top programmers out to work with our IT people and me on a systems integration project.
The guy was on his way out the door at FedEx and had short-timer’s syndrome.
He mentioned to me that he was directed to make it very easy to use their billing software to pay the bills but to do nothing at all to make it easy for the customer to use it for processing claims (eg, late or failed delivery credits).
Or …
Most times you submit a rebate, it tells you to allow some ridiculously long period of time (like … months) to get your money. Another IT guy in that industry told me the processing takes about a minute; the industry relies on people forgetting over time, and the fact that only a fraction will follow up, make the call, and say “Where’s my rebate check??”
I may not like this kind of way of doing business, but it’s anything but rare.
Back when I lived in Seattle, there were a couple of regional festivals with limitations exactly like that. It paid to carefully read venue ads in the local weeklies focusing on dates just before or after the festival. You’d be looking for headliners that you’d never heard of with names something like an album or song title of a band you liked. Then you’d just go get in line and hope you were right.
With social media now, I don’t know if this still happens. Seems like it would be harder to keep undercover.
Yeah, depending on someone else who happens to read a thread on a message board to send them to a generic link on the everbrite website while the original “NO REFUNDS” letter is still up on the event organizer website doesn’t exactly fill me with admiration for anyone.
That’s not actually necessary despite what it says. You just need your email address and your order number and you’ll get the refund shortly.
This whole thing has been a textbook exercise in terrible communication. The very small group of volunteers such as myself only found out a couple of hours before the rest of the public. We’ve done everything we can to get the information out there including contacting all of the media asking them to correct their information.
It has been more than a full time job for us and we’ve helped many hundreds of people get made whole.
You’re welcome