I’ve seen our digital future, and, in a word, it 𝒔𝒖𝒄𝒌𝒔.
They promise frictionless transactions– ever-cheaper goods and services. “Just buy into the digital dream,” they say. “We’ll do more with less.”
Not only have I seen the future, I spent 90 minutes with 30,000 friends outside of Yankee Stadium Saturday night realizing how much it sucks.
We arrived in what should have been plenty of time to watch Notre Dame-Army, made our way to the gate, and then we waited. We waited and waited and waited some more. Kickoff happened to a half-empty stadium. Angry fans chanted “Let us in.” We looked over shoulders to see the rare phone able to stream the game.
Had there been a stadium worker strike? Or some threat causing them to crank up the metal detectors? Surely there had to be some explanation. This stadium hosts 81 major league games a year. Playoffs many years. They sold 47,342 tickets. They knew we were coming!
They didn’t care.
The bottleneck cause didn’t become clear until we arrived at the gate during the second quarter. It was not the metal detectors. People flowed through them as they flashed red. The process would not have prevented someone from walking in with a bazooka (as long as their mints were in a clear plastic bag). To the best of my knowledge, there was no strike.
No, Yankee Stadium had three issues (beyond being home to the Yankees). First, people were scanning their own tickets, often stuck for minutes when the reader wouldn’t accept the scan. Second, there were not enough scanners to handle a 3rd-grade strings concert. And third, they had few staff to resolve problems. It was as if Denny’s decided to fire 90% of their employees and move to a QR-code ordering system on the day they were serving 47,000 meals to an AARP convention.
All hail the digital experience.
But at least we’re all seeing the cost benefits of these labor efficiencies. Oh, wait. Ticket prices have soared– unaffordable for so many families. And somehow in this frictionless, digital world, Ticketmaster (or StubHub or VividSeats or SeatGeek) manages to charge an astronomical “convenience” fee, whether you buy your tickets at face value or through the secondary market.
How I long for the days of paper tickets, parking-lot scalper negotiations, and an actual human being who can rip the bottom off of a ticket in a fraction of a second. You know, back when prices were reasonable and you actually saw the first quarter.
On a night when Notre Dame hoped we’d be talking about playoff chances or the hundred year anniversary of Grantland Rice writing about the Four Horsemen, many (like me) will tell their friends what a horrible experience New York Yankees Stadium delivered. University of Notre Dame, never schedule another game there. Juan Soto, sign somewhere else.
And businesses, you all have digital dreams. Recognize that when you focus on bottom-line savings rather than customer experience, your frictionless dream becomes our friction-filled nightmare.
