In an effort to make up for Ubering I will skip this weekend, I was out trying to drive people last night at like midnight in Montreal.
I did a dropoff in the Old Port and it was a ghost town. It’s worth noting the temperature was pushing 0 degrees and it was a “Tuesday Night”. Still instead of writing yesterday’s article I was caught up trying to make up some money.
Given it was a ghost town, instead of waiting around I had to drive back towards where people would be. I’ve never seen the Old Port so empty. Even a passenger I picked up later in the night couldn’t believe there was not a soul to be seen.
Then again neither of us go out on Tuesdays like that.
As the seasons change and the world moves towards the holidays I’m noticing there are a lot less people out and about than one would expect in Montreal.
The last few Saturdays have felt kind of dead
Since University kicked back in I’ve seen this sharp decline in activity on Saturday night.
I’m aware I’m one little Uber Driver and there’s so much luck involved in Uber that any gamification efforts are still left to the whimsy of the algorithm. There are still certain things that can give you an indication of how busy or dead a night is. Especially because the map changes colour to indicate surge pricing.
This means there is a surplus of demand and a lack of drivers. When the area spreads across multiple neighbourhoods and stays lit up for hours, you know it’s a popping night. When it’s 3 AM (closing time in Montreal) and you’ve seen no significant surges, you know it’s not lit.
On a popping night my trips are non stop between 10 AM and like 3:30 AM. You barely have time to pee and if you didn’t plan for food, good luck. However lately I only really see it on Friday nights and Saturday has started to feel more like a Thursday to me.
From my experience in the food game, I think this decline of people going outside is a bit widespread for us in the city.
This is definitely something that we in entertainment need to pay attention to.
How do we manage live events taking into account this reality?
From what I can tell there is only one legitimate party night left in our city that is year round, that is Friday night.
For a while over the summer I noticed a trend. People were tipping way more generously on Friday than Saturday. Same number of rides, same general attitudes and effort, significantly less tips on Saturday. The best guess I have is that people have less money after day two of partying.
I know I’m just guessing here but it doesn’t feel like Montreal is going through prosperous times. When we throw our events and make our business decisions on how we move forward, I think we need to take this into account. People aren’t really out there looking for things to go to.
We need to try even harder to convince them to not spend money on things like food, to come spend it on us.
I think for a long time people took for granted that live entertainment would follow the previous patterns of the past. The people with experience trusting known models. To some degree it works if you have capital.
When you don’t have that ad spend money, we need to think really differently.
The bars are struggling and the underground raves are popping up all over
While there will always be fans of the booze, young people at large are drinking way less.
The trends show they like to get some mushy chocolate, a weed vape, some ketamine and then nurse their 1 drink for the whole night. As a result drinks got dumb expensive. I go to show after show where my peers drink outside the venue to avoid spending the bar prices.
From what I hear, more and more people are struggling these days. There’s less money around. People aren’t having the greatest time with the way things were.
That being said I see all sorts of parties, promoted via legitimate social media communities thriving and popping. I’m in like 3 Montreal Rave Scene groups that are well curated to keep them on track. As a result, the people who want to see raves, find raves.
These raves are all over at random venues, or even known ones like Red Room, and are full of DJs and kids on drugs in fun outfits.
Maybe this is all paranoia from my stressed self waiting on rides at 1 AM in downtown Montreal. Or maybe there’s some bootstrap tightening going on. Either way we need to take this as a lesson to be better and work smarter to make people want to be around us.
It’s on us to make our culture lit.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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