⛺ Festivals grow bigger, not at all better

It turns out our personal finances are in as bleak a state as they feel.

More than one-third of Americans say they couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense in cash, and the average consumer has ~$5.7k in credit card debt.

To shorten the time between paychecks, more people are turning to wage access apps — services that offer users early access to earned funds in exchange for a fee, per Vox.

The apps fall into two categories:

• Programs integrated directly into employer payroll systems that let workers access their wages in advance before deducting from their paychecks.
• Direct-to-consumer apps that give people their money in advance based on what they say they’ll earn in the future.

The demand for both is rising: Consumers obtained $9.5B through early wage access companies in 2020, up from $3.2B in 2018.

But who uses them? And why?

These apps are particularly popular among low-wage workers in industries like food service, gig work, and retail.

Their popularity hinges on the fact that workers are often not paid enough (the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour) or are paid too slowly.

And they aren’t used for unnecessary splurges: 80% of consumers rely on the apps to pay for essential expenses like groceries, rent, and child care.

There are plenty of issues

Since wage access apps are essentially loans, they come with a heaping side of fine print — and fees:

• Unless an employer swallows the fees, users pay to access their own money. This can range from less than $1 to more than $20, depending on the requested amount.
• Between January 2016 and January 2023, workers filed 450+ complaints against wage access providers with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

These fees add up quickly, and a recent report found fees for early wage access programs averaged an annual interest rate of more than 300%.

Early wage access apps are new…

… and states are still deciding how to regulate them. So far, Connecticut has passed legislation defining them as loans, and California is close behind.

Ultimately, all this discourse highlights the long-standing issue that low-wage American workers are often penalized when struggling to make a living wage.

While there’s been plenty of buzz about concerts going right this summer — shout out to Beyoncé and Taylor Swift — there’s also been much talk about events going really wrong.

We can’t cover failed events without first mentioning the granddaddy of all bamboozles: the 2017 Fyre Festival, AKA the luxury Bahamian festival turned dumpster fire.

But a cultural obsession, a couple of documentaries, and a sentencing later… and we’re still watching festivals combust:

• At this year’s Burning Man, 70k+ people were trapped in the muddy Nevada desert after heavy rain hit the campgrounds.
• Attendees of the 2023 Electric Zoo festival filed a class-action lawsuit against the organizers for multiple last-minute cancellations and closures.
• Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Virginia went south as extreme weather caused confusion and cancellations.
• Thousands were evacuated from the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea due to a heat wave that left many seeking medical treatment.

And sometimes, true tragedy strikes large venues, like at the Astroworld concert in 2021 or, more recently, at the Brooklyn Mirage.

Why is this happening?

In part: more people, more problems. Gathering thousands of attendees together safely requires perfecting the logistics of everything from transportation and bathrooms to emergency services and security.

Plus, many large-scale events are held in remote locations to accommodate large crowds, meaning all infrastructure must be brought in and set up — essentially building cities from scratch, and inviting opportunities for things to go awry.

The rotten cherry on top? An increase in extreme weather conditions are making event planning even less predictable.

The blame game

While labor and material costs go up and consumer spending goes down, large events are left to make it work.

Electric Zoo blamed its cancellations on supply chain issues, writing: “The global supply chain disruptions have impacted industries worldwide, and, sadly, our beloved festival has not been immune.”

On the other hand, Burning Man organizers said there was no need for all the “fuss,” and that the situation was under control.

All we know for sure is that you won’t catch us at Fyre Fest 2.0.

Not sure how to make this sound non-judgmental, but… you pee a lot.

Like, a lot — the average adult produces 100-150 gallons of urine every year.

It takes a bold company to raise its hands (which, let’s assume, it washes over and over again) and commit to collecting and making good use of mankind’s pungent cocktail.

Toopi Organics has been richly rewarded for doing so, with a $17.2m funding round for its urine-based biostimulants, per AgFunderNews.

And biostimulants are…?

They are substances applied to seeds and plants to promote growth, optimize health, enhance nutrient uptake, and/or increase crop yield.

Using urine as a biostimulant isn’t a new concept — it’s been used as fertilizer for thousands of years, in fact — but French startup Toopi takes it a step further by fermenting humanity’s bladder juice.

The end result: a product, Lactopi Start, that Toopi claims is so effective, it can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers by up to 50%, upping sustainability and lowering costs across the agricultural sector.

Sounds great — what’s next?

Toopi’s goal is to cover 600k hectares of European crops with its biostimulant by 2027, which will take an extraordinary amount of pee — specifically, 2m+ liters.

Enter the infusion of capital, meant to expand Toopi’s urine collection network. Its partners already include highway rest stop operators, a company that leases port-a-potties to music festivals, and now a French theme park.

Following the essential collection part of the operation, it’ll store and convert its sloshing buckets into biostimulants at two new facilities in France and Belgium.

Then, Toopi will start selling its product far and wide, in hopes it can, uh, catch the fertilizer business with its pants down.