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2024-06-05 01:01
in Clubbing, Festivals
This post is about festivals that require you to use their wristbands to pay for just about everything. I will not count festivals that allow paying with your wristband if you wish to (like TX eclipse festival), since that's adding choice and you can ignore that if you wish. I will count festivals like boom that were a bit of a mess when I went and required wristband money for some vendors (drinks) while other vendors were allowed to use cards or even cash in addition to wristband money.
So, what is wristband money, even? Yeah, let's define that first. I've heard of at least one festival (ultra in mexico city) that was even worse and required using some plastic card with a loaded value, and the vendors would scam you by giving you another card back with less money than you had, OMG. Wristband money is some festivals that figured out they could use a complex and often unreliable computer system to keep track of your rfid number and assign some stored money value to it. They have various ways to recharge it, with various levels of reliability. A few require physical money to recharge (definitely run away from those), while others accept credit cards online on their website, and usually some machines or humans around the festival.
Some claim they are a good thing because "they are cashless" which of course is utter BS since credit cards are almost all tap to pay, so is your android or apple phone, and all of this is similarly cashless (I very much understand they don't want you to pay with actual money anymore since it's slow and there is a risk of theft for them) but in real life the only plus I've seen is that they are usually a few seconds faster than your credit card or your phone and they can technically work in locations where there is no wifi or cell to authorize a credit card transaction, but obviously this is fixable by adding wifi for vendors, like most festivals do.
Oh yeah, one alternate scheme, that is just as bad, or maybe even a bit worse, are festivals that make you buy some plastic money tokens (like multiple festivals in holland used to, including lumi, but they thankfully stopped), or some like unkonscious that literally made you buy some worthless "someone just printed it in the back room" paper money that you had to buy, pay with, and leftovers were lost. Worse, leftovers were not even usable the next day as the next venue had their own incompatible fake paper money. I'll let you decide if you should say no to this and buy nothing out of protest, but you know my answer.
this is mostly solving a non problem. In most countries most of us have pay by phone or pay by contactless credit card. Lumi is actually one festival doing the right thing and selling plastic cards you can load up if you don't have any credit card or phone to pay with. Yes, such schemes plastic card, or wristband money, are ok if they are the fallback for people without tap to pay (in some countries many people don't have credit cards even)
multiple festivals have lost my money I tried to put online before the festival, it was never sent to my wristband. I had to lose many hours over many days to dispute the charges and get my money back
multiple festivals lost the money I loaded at the festival on my wristband, including boom that literally lost 100 euros. I went to see their help, they wasted a lot of my time saying they'd fix it, they never did. I had to fight them through my credit card to get my money back when I got home. Why so much wasted time, bad energy and bad feelings needlessly created by trying to be a bank, which festivals are not qualified or rated to do. Untold, 2 years in a row, also screwed up, wasted an hour of my festival time trying to fix their incompetence at being a bank, which indeed they are not. I love untold, but they spoiled it with that. Why am I wasting my time dealing with this?
festivals refuse to understand that they become banks by storing money for you and promising to give it back when you want to use it. Being a bank is hard, full of corners cases, race conditions, auditing requirements for the customer, required paper receipts for full transparency, and many more things. Every single festival I've seen failed at multiple of those points, including the multiple that lost my money in various ways
festivals that refuse to give you your money back, or only over a certain amount, almost always through some procedure that is often error prone and may not work for people in other countries, are adding to the problem. Almost all of them get it wrong, and the ones that completely refuse to even refund you are literally thieves. EDC Mexico that forced you to load your wristband and then gave you a new wristband every day, losing the money you had on the previous wristband the previous day, OMG, really?
What can you do?
contact the organizers and complain. Tell them you will do your best to consume as little as possible if this does not change and consider other festivals instead in protest. Make sure they understand that wristband money is unreliable, unsafe to you, obviously unnecessary in almost all cases, and spoil the festival giving vibes of unnecessary greed and very bad experiences when they do lost your money or fail to refund what's left over, or even flat out refuse to.
buy nothing, or as little to nothing as you can.
if there is no potable water offered inside, and you must use one of those wristband schemes, see if you can sneak some water in, or find other solutions although #1 should be your first move although in real life should you even go to a festival that disregards their customers so badly?
contact festivals before you go if you are not sure of their policy
So what do you think? Am I being too harsh? Am I incorrect? Did you also have bad experiences with this?
To the people who somehow still prefer to use that fake money, I'm ok with it as long as the festival does accept legal tender, in the form of credit cards and pay by phone. This was my full post about it where I asked for comments: https://www.facebook.com/ledtranceguy/posts/pfbid02o5MCiKeWwBJ2j9kJhBfqMng6zRnbaQe3XZcKjj7SKVspMcQDkzVjETAUCAUFbHNDl Main answers:"It's convenient not to have to carry money/credit cards" (well, not really since you need a credit card to recharge/buy the fake money)
"The main issue I have with it is when the festival makes up their own currency which is always some weird conversion rate designed to make it hard for you to compare prices at a glance."
"They all do it to take a cut of the food sales. That's the only reason."
Parookaville didn't get the memo, they literally print their own fake plastic money
Unkonscious prints their own paper money, and it's not even compatible between days :(
To the people who somehow still prefer to use that fake money, I'm ok with it as long as the festival does accept legal tender, in the form of credit cards and pay by phone. This was my full post about it where I asked for comments: https://www.facebook.com/ledtranceguy/posts/pfbid02o5MCiKeWwBJ2j9kJhBfqMng6zRnbaQe3XZcKjj7SKVspMcQDkzVjETAUCAUFbHNDl Main answers:
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