How Mercury Retrograde Affects Special Events [Updated for 2024]

If you're planning your next product launch, store opening, charity gala or corporate event, you'll want it to run smoothly.

Well here's one ancient special events planning tool you may have never considered.

Not only can it help you select a suitable date for your event, it can warn you against particular periods when people will make mistakes, you'll encounter frustrating delays and setbacks. 

Yes, it's astrology.

How Mercury retrograde affects special events planning
Mercury retrograde refers to a three-week period every three months where the planet of communication appears to stop and go backwards across the heavens.

Mercury rules everything to do with communication (email, text, phone, snail mail, social media, contracts, conversations, quotes and messages) and transport (hire cars for VIP guests, taxis, Ubers, trucks, deliveries, postal vans, courier companies etc). All of these are vital to event planning.

When Mercury is retrograde, you can:

• miss email enquiries going to spam folders
• miss voicemail messages and texts
• write down the wrong phone number, email or address
• misinterpret someone's tone and/or information over the phone
• leave out important information
• forget to chase something up
• forget to do something important
• deliver to the wrong address
• have key contacts to be sick or on holidays
• get frustrated by suppliers not calling you back
• experience the quote getting revised
• change your mind several times
• "think" you have all the time in the world!

If your event falls during a Mercury retrograde period, you need to triple-check all guest, venue and supplier arrangements to the point of embarrassment.

If you are planning a future product launch, store opening, expo or corporate event, build in expected delays and potential errors in supplier correspondence as well as delays in actual items being delivered during the Mercury retrograde period.

If you have a particularly long lead time, you will notice that your contacts who have been failing to return your emails, phone calls, texts and quotes, who haven't got signoff from their boss, who are sick, on holidays or away on business will come back to you - and possibly with a decision - on the day Mercury turns direct.

Why? Because people flake out and decide at the last minute not to attend, or forget it's on, or double-book themselves or can't get a car park spot and give up. The key message you want to put across can get lost. The event ticket booking system can crash or your VIP guest of honour is sick and can't attend. And so on.

Mercury retrograde dates for 2024 will be 1-25 April 2024, 5-28 August 2024, 25 November-15 December 2024.

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