U2 TICKET CHAOS. AGAIN.

After the screw-up of ticket sales at the start of the U2 tour - people who'd paid for access to a computer system found it crashed - U2 have managed to engineer another PR disaster in Brazil as another ticketing exercise collapsed in chaos.

Depite an outrageous ticket price - Bono's desire to help the poor of the world doesn't extend to doing anything that will hurt his own pocket, it turns out, and tickets cost two-thirds of the minimum monthly wage - thousands of people queued round the blocks to try and get gig tickets, distribution of which had been put in the hands of the Pao de Acucar supermarkets. Only ten stores in Sao Paulo and two in Rio were given tickets, and most only assigned one cashier to take care of the sales.

U2 are playing a football stadium with a capacity of 73,000. So, even if demand had only matched supply, twelve cashiers would have had to be selling tickets at the rate of seventeen a minute to deal with the demand in a single seven hour day, which was always going to be unlikely. Since queues had started forming the day before, most people might have guessed that demand was going to be more than for supply.

Cash machines broke; tempers got short; police got called out to keep an eye on things.

It's turned into a bit of a PR disaster for Pao de Acucar - queuing fans started to chant against Abilio Diniz, who runs the chain, and pledged their future alleigance to rival Carrefour.

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