Anyway, it took more than a year from when we applied to when we got our first check. A year with zero customers. And then in late 2024 -- nearly four years later -- they did some kind of rule-changing rug-pull on us. They were "reviewing our file" and demanded that we submit an "audit report consistent with 2 CFR 200 Subpart F".

Just more dumb bureaucracy, right? Well.

Hiring someone to do that audit report correctly cost us $20,000. TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. And had we not done it, they would have demanded we pay back all of the money we got in 2021.

In 2021, they literally told us, "You have to spend all this money. If you don't spend it all within a year, on these things, then you can't keep it." So we didn't even have the option to sit on twenty grand to pay for the eventual audit, even if they had told us that was going to happen, which they did not.

Couldn't they have just given us $20k less and paid for the audit with that? No, apparently not.

Anyway, the auditors decided that we had done something slightly wrong. Let's say we had expenses A through Z, and we said, "We are using the grant to pay for A, B and C." The auditors said, "Oh, you can't spend it on C. But you are allowed to spend it on D through F, so all you have to do is file an amendment, and it all comes out the same."

So we do that... and... crickets.

See, in between when this audit crap started, and the auditors finished, DOGE had dismantled the Small Business Administration, and they just... stopped answering their phones, or email. Even the auditors could not get hold of anybody and that's their entire business.

So between October 2024 and March 2026 we were unable to get anyone at SBA to respond to our request to amend the grant! They didn't say "no" (if they said "no" they would have demanded that we pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars) but rather than saying "yes" they just kept sending us monthly automated emails from a "noreply" address noting that "your Audit Report is still outstanding" and that "Your timely response is anticipated and appreciated in order to resolve any compliance issues."

For two years.

And then today -- the rains have come and the crops are saved!

The Small Business Administration's Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program (SVOG) has completed its review of your audit submission package. SBA has determined that your organization has fully and materially complied with Federal grant audit requirements for fiscal year 2022.

Our accountant and the auditors wasted so many (billable) hours just trying to get someone on the phone to respond in any way, so the total wasn't just the $20,000 we had to pay the audit firm. It also included all the work our accountant did. Fortunately accountants are boss-level note-takers:

• 43 emails with SBA;
• 286 emails with the audit firm;
• 4+ multi-hour zoom calls with the audit firm;
• Calling SBA every Wednesday to inquire on the status of our amendments, for at least a year -- 50+ calls lasting at least 30 minutes and getting nowhere, so that's 25 hours right there.

So besides the audiors themselves, babysitting this also cost us somewhere north of 250 hours of labor from our own accountant.

For nothing.

Nothing.

To get us right back to zero.

It's impressive how Apartheid Emerald Mine Space Karen and Cheeto Mussolini have made our government so much more "efficient".

This is where I mention that if you would like to help out with the DNA Lounge Accountancy Defense Fund, you can make a one-time donation or join our Patreon, which by the way is a really good deal.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/03/25.html/feed/ 8 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/03/13.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/03/13.html#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:04:17 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVAt always one of them. Spare them a little rage if you have any left to give. When, two years ago, we heard that DOJ was moving forward with their anti-trust suit against Live Nation we all knew it was too good to be true, and, yup, it was too good to be true. The DOJ folded with not even a slap on the wrist.

And because of that, it seems that a number of state attorneys general are considering folding as well. Here's a form from NIVA to help you send email to your state's attorney general telling them to keep fighting.

Bipartisan group of states refuse to sign settlement between Justice Department and Live Nation:

New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio and Kansas are just a few of the states continuing the lawsuit.

"The settlement recently announced with the U.S. Department of Justice fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case, and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers. We cannot agree to it," New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.

The Justice Department and some 40 attorneys general first launched the lawsuit against Live Nation in 2024 under the Biden administration, alleging the concert giant had built an illegal monopoly over live events by controlling ticketing, venues and artist promotion. In effect, they argued, Live Nation had pushed out competitors and locked venues into exclusive arrangements that harmed both artists and fans.

At least the suit gave us some popcorn:

Live Nation Employees Boast About Gouging Fans With Fees:

Baker, who oversees ticketing for Live Nation's venue nation unit, called some increased prices "fucking outrageous," with Weinhold replying that "I have VIP parking up to $250 lol."

"I almost feel bad taking advantage of them," Baker replied.

In another exchange, Baker shared a screenshot of premier parking costs, further stating "robbing them, blind, baby, that's how we do." Later in the exchange, Baker said, "I gouge them on ancil prices to make up for it," referring to extra ancillary fees on more standard tickets.

Satire, but who can tell:

Live Nation restricts ticket buying and selling exclusively to bots:

"Our platform optimizes for multiple devices logged in at once and spamming the queue," notes Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. "Once ticket sales are live, that's when the bots buy up the max tickets per person until they are all sold out in under 1 minute, though our software engineers are trying to get that down to 30 seconds."

Rapino adds, "Yes artists send out codes and have fan presales, but we always ensure that all of the bots get those too, since it'd be really unfair if these hardworking robots had to wait until general sale day." [...]

The announcement has been met with widespread support from StubHub, Viagogo, and a series of shell companies that, when contacted for comment, all responded within 0.003 seconds with identical statements saying they were "just regular fans."

The list of Live Nation's sins will not be news to anyone who has been following this blog for any length of time:

• "Wherein three national corporations control nearly all of San Francisco's live music."
• "Ticketmaster is recruiting professional scalpers who cheat its own system to expand its resale business and squeeze more money out of fans".
• "Live Nation admits putting tickets straight on the resale market".
• "Live Nation and DOJ reach 'settlement' that does nothing but extend the time period of the consent decree, with no fine."
• "Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who personally ordered that Jamal Khashoggi be kidnapped and dismembered alive with a bone saw, now owns 6% of Live Nation / TicketMaster."
• "Big Music Needs to Be Broken Up to Save the Industry".
• Wherein John Oliver reminds us that there are lots of things to be angry about, but one of them is still TicketMaster.

Jason Scott of Internet Archive was kind enough to digitize them for us. And these nearly-40-year-old VHS tapes turned out to be of surprisingly high quality! The very high resolution scans of the raw tapes are at Internet Archive.

I've also split them apart and uploaded them to YouTube, so here's a playlist of more than 24 hours of live performances at DNA Lounge spanning the years 1988 through 1992! Plus some other stuff.

We are also hosting a memorial for Spencer on the afternoon of Sat, Apr 4. If you knew him, please stop by!]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/25.html/feed/ 9 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/11.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/11.html#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:43:31 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVAP flyer screen there." So we finally did that in the pizza alcove. I think they look pretty good! We just stuck the monitors into the same style of picture frames we use in the DNA Pizza dining room gallery.

My vendetta against tape on the walls is endless. I just think it looks really tacky. Plus, one of the things about paper that it is famous for is always showing the same thing. Whereas these screens have all kinds of complications. (In watchmaking, anything that a timepiece does beyond showing hours, minutes and seconds is called a "complication", and I love that term.)

For example, they are sensitive to the room they are in and the genres of the show that is currently happening, so if it's a metal night, they're going to show flyers for other metal shows much more often. They are likewise skewed toward showing shows happening sooner than later.

And another recent complication is the dancing QR codes. I put a bunch of work into making the underlying URLs as short as possible so that the QR codes have big chunky pixels that you can scan from across the room (or from space.)

We also use a couple of screens in the Pizza checkout lane to hype our appetizers.

In summary, digital signage is a land of complications.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/11.html/feed/ 9 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/01.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/01.html#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:41:20 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVAF Yesterday I mentioned that DNA Pizza takes online delivery orders again, after a year-long hiatus. Hooray...

Perhaps it has been long enough since I talked about deliveries that you have forgotten how terrible everything has been! Let's recap!

We opened DNA Pizza in 2011, and from then until roughly 2015, we had decent delivery business. It was a pretty significant portion of our income. In fact, our delivery business was a big part of why it sounded like a good idea at the time to open a second venue, Codeword in 2015. We had been having trouble keeping up with orders on weekend nights, so once Codeword opened we staged all delivery orders from there, freeing up the DNA Lounge oven for in-house slices.

In the early days, we employed our own delivery drivers (we had a car topper and everything!) And while some restaurant apps like Eat24 and Grubhub existed at the time, they just ran the menu-and-credit-cards system: restaurants were still responsible for doing their own deliveries. But having our own drivers just wasn't economical and in around 2014, I held my nose and we switched to using "Uber Eats" for delivery. Again, at the time, they were a delivery company, which is a thing that (thanks to them) no longer exists. We conducted the transaction; they put it in a car. You used the app to summon a driver to pick up a bag instead of a person.

But in 2017, Uber abruptly decided that if you wanted them to deliver something, you also had to allow them to operate your online store, and let them take a percentage of that. So we dropped them on principle, and switched to Postmates. But then eventually Uber bought Postmates too. So we switched to Grubhub, who had recently started doing deliveries as well as ordering: this gave Grubhub the same downsides as Uber Eats, but at least they weren't Uber.

It was between 2015 and 2017 that Grubhub and similar apps started becoming really popular, and as soon as they did, our delivery business absolutely cratered. Not only did the number of delivery orders go way down, but deliveries became damn near uneconomical due to the huge cut taken by the apps, taking 15% to 30% of the value of the order rather than charging per mile for a delivery. Our margins were obliterated.

And on top of the extortionate delivery apps came the fraudulent "ghost kitchens", the fake clickbait restaurants all running out of the same warehouse that existed only as online branding. So by 2017, Travis Kalanick's debasement and destruction of the restaurant industry was nearly complete.

Twelve or fifteen years ago, the idea of a pizza restaurant that made no money from deliveries would have been inconceivable. Pizza was the canonical late-night delivery food for the entirety of the Twentieth Century. But here we are, "disrupted" by techbros.

Over the years, besides Grubhub, we used to use some other delivery services as well (DoorDash, Slice, Allset, a few others) but we stopped because we got no business from them. Like, literally one order a month or less. And that was back in the day when we did get a significant number of delivery orders through Grubhub. It was just that nobody used those services. Grubhub was, at least at the time, the 800 pound gorilla, the only game in town.

And then around 2022, Grubhub just flat out stopped working. They were so astoundingly incompetent that we got essentially zero orders through them. Their web site was never showing DNA Pizza to customers, even when they searched for it directly, and for close to two years their tech support was so useless that eventually we just gave up. It was so bad that in 2023 I asked the Lazyweb for help out of desperation, And despite turning up some technical contacts within Grubhub, nothing got better at all. So in early 2025, we just closed our Grubhub account and decided, "Welp, I guess we don't offer deliveries at all any more".

Then! Funny story! A couple months ago, a new "territory manager" got hired at Grubhub and hit us up with a "please come back" email. Devon's reply was so blistering that I'm just gonna include most of it here:

Your suggestions don't even begin to address the issue we had.

We had issues with your backend. Menus would vanish. I spent countless hours providing your support teams with steps to reproduce the problem. we got extremely deranked. I got support once to agree to completely rebuild our storefront from scratch so that we would be free of the various issues that support was unable to fix. Support just cloned the store and it had the same problems.

There was some deeply buried bug involving an integration from the otter tablet company that was disabling menus in some non-standard way. And we got de-ranked again, because our menus would turn off at inconvenient times with no way to turn them back on. Support was terrible and useless and never believed me.

So, no, having commissions waived won't do us any good when your platform itself was turning off our menus in ways that nobody who worked for you could figure out how to fix. [...]

I wasted easily 100 hours of my life over a few years on this nonsense.

Nope. Never again. Your company is terrible. You should get a job somewhere else before Grubhub gets bought again and they gut staffing even more.

So, let's hope this Chow Now thing works better than that.

As with all techbro disruption, you have to follow the money to understand this. At first glance you might think that Grubhub's customers are the hungry people ordering food. But Grubhub's actual income is the money that they claw back from the restaurants as subscription fees and a vig on every order, which means that their actual customers are the restaurants. And they will put the screws to each of those restaurants harder and harder, until they die off and another one is slotted in to replace them. They can do this because these days the restaurants have no other choice. This is a canonical example of the oft-misapplied term "Enshittification".

And the galaxy-brain version of "who are the customers?" is "the investors". It doesn't matter if Grubhub becomes so useless that it collapses entirely, so long as the VCs and C-suite get an IPO or private equity buyout just before that happens. Their victory condition is a mob bust-out, rather than a sustainable, long-term business.

Oh yeah! Speaking of Travis Kalanick's ratfucking of the restaurant industry,

Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2025 14:11:26 -0500
From: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
Subject: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity

DNA Pizza Team,

Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

I'd like to connect and talk with you about a possible partnership with one of our food halls in the Bay Area. Have you considered expanding your reach to other markets? I'm not sure if what we offer would work for you, however, It wouldn't hurt to hear me out, take a tour, and see what options we can offer.

What are your thoughts?

Keep up the good cooking,

I did not hold back:

Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2025 12:28:34 -0700
From: jwz@dnalounge.com
To: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
Subject: Re: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity

You have got a lot of nerve. Your company single-handedly destroyed the Bay Area restaurant industry and you still have the gall to come sniffing around the corpse. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you absolute parasites.

BTW, have your Saudi owners murdered any journalists lately?

What I did not expect... was a reply!

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:56:13 -0700
From: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
To: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@dnalounge.com>
Subject: Re: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity

Hello Jamie,

Thanks for your patience with me getting back to you.

It's unfortunate you feel this way towards CloudKitchens and what the company is attempting to accomplish for restaurant owners and operators in the industry. However, I appreciate your candor. I'll be sure to relay your message to the proper channels.

In summary, running a small business is a land of contrasts. Please buy our pizza, it's actually really good.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/01.html/feed/ 20 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/01/31.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/01/31.html#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:15:11 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVAE It's been almost a year since we closed DNA Pizza's Grubhub account, but we're back online now with Chow Now. It seems to be working ok so far?

The restaurant's hours are still tied to the nightclub, which means we only accept orders while DNA Lounge is open. This means, roughly, every Friday, Saturday and Monday from 8pm or 9pm to 2am; and other days of the week as the event calendar dictates.

So give it a try tonight! In... just about 4 hours.

This time the online ordering is (finally!) more directly integrated with our point of sale. With every other ordering system we've used in the past, when someone placed an order, it would show up on a customized, locked-down tablet provided by the outside company, and our cashiers would have to notice it ping and then transcribe the order into our system. But this new one talks to our POS directly, so it goes in like every other cashier order.

This means that it finally makes sense for an in-person customer to use it as a "skip the line" order -- you can place your order from the dance floor or the sidewalk, and then in a few minutes, head on over to the restaurant for pick-up. So that's kind of cool.

Anyway, wow do I have some things to say about online ordering, but writing that up has completely gotten away from me, so I'll save that for a later post.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/01/31.html/feed/ 11