Hot Doug's Hot Dog Festival Canceled Due To Poor Ticket Sales

By Mae Rice in Food on Jun 17, 2016 6:22PM

(Hot Doug's by Tim Pigott)

Hot Doug's second annual Dog Dayz of Summer festival has been canceled due to lack of interest, organizer Criterion Productions announced via the festival website on Friday. Tickets to the festival, which was slated for June 24 and 25, will be refunded ASAP.

"[T]his particular event has not been able to reach the goals necessary to sustain its continuation," Geoff Miller writes in Criterion's announcement. Eater translated this into more colloquial terms after talking with Hot Doug's founder, Doug Sohn: the festival wasn't making money.

Sohn sees this less as a sign of Hot Doug's fatigue than of street festival fatigue, he told Eater. Now, street fests are hard to avoid, wherever you are, however hard you try.

Still... there might be a touch of Hot Doug's fatigue in there. Though Sohn sort of retired in October of 2014, closing down Hot Doug's permanent location, he's been popping up steadily ever since: serving hot dogs at Wrigley Field (an ongoing project); hosting the first, and now likely last, Dog Dayz of Summer festival in 2015; and hosting a pop-up this past January that people truly flipped out about.

But people can't flip out about hot dogs forever. Even in Chicago. RIP, all-you-can-eat sausage fest.