Back in 2023, I covered the conditions faced by Coachella and Power Trip attendees looking to buy merchandise—and the experiences were far from pleasant.
Four-plus hour wait times. No line management. Attendees stuck in line missing sets. Broiling temperatures. Simply put, buying a T-shirt at our local festivals was a nightmare.
Good news: In 2025, the merch-buying experience is much better. Bad news: There is still a lot of room to improve.
At Coachella, much of the improvement was due to the fact that organizers finally split merch sales between two tents—one for festival merch, and one for artists’ merch. This split meant it only took me about 10 minutes to make it through each line.
But at Stagecoach, artist and festival merch were back under one tent—and things were hectic from the start. On Friday, I had flashbacks to previous merch-tent nightmares when I got to the tent at 2:30, an hour and a half after the festival’s doors had opened. The tent was almost full, and the American Express cardholder line stretched out into the sun. Friday was the warmest day of the whole fest, with a high of 81 degrees.
I overheard one attendee say to her friend, “Is that the line? We can come any other day.” Another group of people asked a man exiting how long he’d waited, and he replied: “We waited 55 minutes, but if you get in line now, you’re looking at over an hour.” A number of people exiting the tent looked rather upset, either from the heat or the long-merch lines, so I decided do interviews on a different day.
Saturday provided even more challenges. As I passed by, I noticed the tent was again packed. A fellow media colleague, who has been covering Stagecoach for nearly a decade, noted, “That’s the longest I’ve ever seen that line.”
On a positive note, the heat wasn’t much of an issue on Saturday. While lines stretched out into the sun, the high on Saturday was 75 degrees—though there was a lot of wind, and it’s worth noting that most of the Stagecoach-branded sweaters sold out on Saturday. Meanwhile, merch was the topic of a few threads on the Stagecoach subreddit; one on Saturday was titled, “is every single merch sweatshirt sold out already.” One early Sunday asked, “Are Sweatshirts Sold out Today too?”
When I walked up to the merch tent around 4 p.m. on Sunday, the tent was only about half-full. I thought the vibes might be more cheerful, so I decided to try to talk to some merch customers.
Boy, was I wrong about the vibes. I get it; festival wristbands are quite expensive, so any time spent talking to a journalist instead of seeing country stars is like burning money. However, at previous Coachella fests, when I politely introduced myself and explained the few questions I had regarding the merch-buying experience, most attendees offered more kindness than a dismissive “no” or ignoring me altogether. Not so at Stagecoach 2025.
Thankfully, a group of women—Morgan, Jamie and Abby—were kind enough to share their thoughts with me.
“I was expecting way worse, especially on the last day,” Morgan said. “I thought everyone was going to be here waiting. We got right in, to start the day, and maybe waited 30, 40 minutes.”
Morgan said the group waited until Sunday to buy merch after seeing the intense crowds on Friday and Saturday—but they were going to wait as long as it took on Sunday.
“We needed sweatshirts for the nighttime,” said Jamie. “That was a necessity.”
The group picked a time to wait in line for merch when there were no sets they wanted to see. While they mostly had positive things to say about their buying experience, Morgan suggested some merch menus throughout the line.
“It was really overwhelming to not see all of the things all until you’re up there,” said Morgan.
Said Abby: “There should be lines for the different artists. If you just wanted Luke Combs or Zach Bryan, go in this specific line, and you guys just wait in the regular merch line.”
In other words, she was suggesting the separate tents Coachella had, but Stagecoach didn’t, for some reason.
After over an hour of trying to get some interviews, I decided to do some real investigative journalism and hop into the merch line myself. Right away, I saw things that could be improved. Though the line was shorter than it had been on Friday and Saturday, the metal barriers for the longer lines remained, and as I walked through the empty rows in the back, others moved the rails and took a shortcut to the line. Despite all of the cutting, a lot of people left the line as we inched closer, apparently disappointed by the number of sold-out items.
Another big issue I noticed was the flag system: To signal that a merch stall is open, the cashier waves a flag, which prompts someone on the customer side to wave their flag, which signals the worker to send the next customer over. This process requires three people to work together—and those three people were not always paying attention.
Next, staffing: A number of sales stalls were unoccupied. I counted close to 10 iPads and card readers just collecting dirt on the table.
Finally … there was a staffer apparently offering free merch? As I neared the front of the line, a drunk lady, T-shirts in hand, approached the group in front of me and said, “Ask for (name)! He will hook you up. He gave me merch that wasn’t even up there.” I laughed this off, thinking it was just some drunken ramblings—but then I heard the women behind me ask a staff member about getting hooked up with merch. To my surprise, he told them, “Make sure you go to the guy with a hat, he’ll give you a free koozie or something.”
I made it to a register, purchased a $5 koozie (the can insulators were the cheapest item), and exited the merch line. The whole process took me 46 minutes—far better than the hours long waits of previous years, but far longer than the two-tent Coachella experience.