A new update has been posted by GDTS TOO, the ticketing service in charge of mail orders. The update says that the received “many, many times” more requests than they anticipated, and that they’ll be notifying winners today and tomorrow.

Here’s the full text:

We’ve been submerged in a sea of mail and are coming up for a breath of air to give you an update on where we stand right now. We are 75% of the way processing all of the orders, working 24/7 to get your money orders back to you. There were many, many times more order requests than anyone imagined, thousands and thousands with beautiful art. We are trying to let as many folks as possible know their status before the onsale date. Emails will go out to the winners starting in the next two days. Your chances of receiving tickets from us are 1 in 10, so if you have not received a winner’s email from us by the on-sale date, you may want to consider on line ticket sales to increase your chances.
Tickets will be mailed out in June.
Please do not email us at this time as we will not be able to answer your inquiry.

Okay, we are taking a deep breath and going back under.
The crew of GDTS TOO
2.23.15

“Some days the gales are howling
Some days the sea is still as glass”
John Barlow

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A new report from the local Marin Independent Journal states that the Stinson Beach post office has been sending out roughly 2,000-3,000 rejection letters on on a daily basis, ever since being flooded with over 60,000 ticket requests from fans eager to see the “Fare Thee Well” reunion shows.

The article includes statements from postal clerk Mark White, who said, “We got inundated with far more requests than anyone expected… They (the ticket staff) like to give us an idea of how many they’re going to get when they do these shows, but the fact is there hasn’t been a show of this calibre for a long time.”

“It was a problem when we were getting 15,000 to 20,000 envelopes with tickets requests in one day. We’re a very small office,” said White. 

Really, the main piece of interesting information from the article is the sheer quantity of rejection letters this small office is mailing in a single day. No one is quite sure why the office didn’t anticipate such a high demand, considering that these shows have been billed as the final shows with the Core Four, and that they will include Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio.

The initial motivation behind creating a mail order service in the 1980’s was to spare older Deadheads, who now had jobs and families, from waiting overnight on lengthy Ticketmaster lines. However, with the advent of the internet, this problem seems to have corrected itself, begging the question: was the mail order system really necessary for these final shows? Sure, it’s a nice throwback, and some of the artwork is certainly incredible, but is it really worth all the commotion?