Cheap Mrs. Maisel Gas Made Los Angeles Traffic Even Worse

Los Angeles traffic is so terrible there is no punchline here; the sentence is just fact. And very often, there is not any discernible reason for sitting motionless on the 101 for an hour, just too many people trying to get from point A to point B simultaneously. However, if you found yourself stuck in hellacious L.A. traffic today blame Amazon, bizarre promotional marketing stunts, poor planning, and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

On August 15, the city of Los Angeles allowed a corporation to promote a television show by declaring it #MaiselDay and offering 30-cent gas, causing such a frenzy among cash-strapped denizens in one of the most expensive cities in the world that taxpayer-funded police had to intervene. That all sounds good and normal and likely to get more people to watch an already-popular television show.

To celebrate Mrs. Maisel’s bucketloads of Emmy nominations, Amazon partnered with businesses around Santa Monica, California, packed with tourists in August, to offer local goods at 50s prices, including milkshakes, hotel rooms, and gas. While the good news is that nobody got trampled for a strawberry malted, the bad news is that police had to shut the promotion down until marketers could think of some system for organizing a better line, something that perhaps should have been addressed in the initial planning period. If you were in Santa Monica today, I hope you were able to get a shoeshine for a quarter or something while you fought your way through a 2019 advertainment hellscape.