World Cup tourists are coming to L.A. for the soccer, but they’re staying for the $21 smoothies and Double-Doubles.
As the last Los Angeles FIFA World Cup event ended Friday, soccer fans were eating like locals and famous chains from the region were cashing in.
In the weeks that L.A. has hosted the World Cup, international soccer enthusiasts have flocked to big brands from the area, often in large groups wearing their countries’ jerseys.
It is a phenomenon seen at many of the host cities. In Dallas, giant gas station Buc-ee’s is the main attraction. For people visiting New Jersey, deli shops have been a hot ticket. In L.A., the place to be between matches was Erewhon.
Thirsty international sports fans gathered for pictures outside different Erewhons, wandered their aisles smiling, and, of course, picked up pricey smoothies.
While Erewhon would not comment on its business, mobility data company Arity, which uses phone data to track consumers, said Erewhon visits at the outlets around SoFi Stadium were quadruple what they were a week earlier on June 12, the day of the U.S. national soccer team’s opening match there.
Arity looked at what stores people visited within a 10-mile radius of SoFi that day and also found surges in visitors to nearby El Pollo Loco and Trader Joe’s.
Locals have spotted groups of people in Korea jerseys huddled together, trying to decide what to order at In-N-Out.
Some complained on social media that international tourists at Trader Joe’s were buying up all the mini canvas tote bags.
Soon after the Belgium vs. Spain quarterfinal ended Friday, the In-N-Out near SoFi had a long line of soccer fans stretching out the door in bright red and yellow and black jerseys and matching striped hats and scarves.
One of the workers said he had to explain “spread” and “animal style” to foreign football fans.
“I didn’t know this place existed,” a fan from Romania said while waiting in line.
Los Angeles and other cities and states that have hosted the event need the soccer fans to spend money to make the event worth all the time, effort and money it requires.
A rosy 2024 report projected the World Cup could bring more than $800 million to the L.A. region as 180,000 people converge on the area to sleep, eat and spend.
There were early concerns people weren’t turning up for the event because of the high ticket prices and the difficulty of obtaining visas for citizens of some countries.
However, at least for some L.A. hotels, there was a surge of last-minute visitors which pushed up occupancy and room rates.
While sports fans are not in the region to shop, they do make time for it.
World Cup customer spending is also apparent in beer sales. Andrew Heritage, the chief economist at the Beer Institute said beer purchases at entertainment and attractions in L.A. – outside of World Cup spaces – were up around 10% from normal.
“That tells me that fans in the L.A. area have decided to extend their stay and take in all the other things that the area has to offer, rather than just the match itself,” he said.
On social media, the purpose of these shoppers is clear: grab a quick souvenir or local specialty and take a selfie.
The data from Arity suggests that fans are very efficient when they spend at local spots, diving in, getting what they want and getting out as soon as possible, said Jeff Schlitt, a director at the company.
“Normally you’re there for an hour. They’re going to be there for 15, 18 minutes,” he said. “Why is that? Because they were purpose-driven shoppers.”
For some travelers, the more popular American chains aren’t unfamiliar. But some of the native L.A. fare still comes as a surprise.
As one Belgium-Spain matchgoer from the Netherlands stood taking a picture of the In-N-Out sign after the game, he said he’d never had a burger like the one he’d just tried.
“We only have McDonald’s and Burger King,” he said. “It’s way better.”
NEW YORK — Manhattan was sweltering at 100 degrees and preparing to mark 250 years since the United States declared independence from Great Britain.
But on Friday, the city seemed transfixed by what might be the closest the country gets to a royal wedding: The nuptials of pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Madison Square Garden and its surrounding streets — 31st and 33rd streets toward 6th and 8th avenues — were blocked off as guests arrived for the event. Fans craned their necks for any views they could get from the street.
The world-famous arena is reportedly set to transform into a “massive castle,” surrounded by a garden fit for pop culture’s royal couple, both 36. While the complete event details and guest list have been kept a secret, the Associated Press reportedly obtained a city permit showing Friday’s supposed wedding event is set to start at 5 p.m. Eastern time and could last until 4 a.m.
Secrecy surrounding the event is so tight that the reported venue has been cordoned off with privacy tents, tarps and barricades. But neither those measures nor Friday’s sizzling temperatures stopped fans from gathering in hopes of sneaking a peak at their longtime idol and sending Swift their well wishes.
“I heard we won’t be able to see her either way because the spot that they picked is going to be covered,” said Sarah Shrestha, 21, an Anaheim resident visiting friends in Manhattan.
Madison Square Garden was a good venue for the couple’s nuptials because “in interviews, [Swift] said she wanted to be able to invite everybody to the wedding so it’s still a good venue for that,” she added.
Ellie Kitschke, 13, and her mother, Mymy Nguyen, 38, were visiting New York City from Adelaide, Australia.
Ellie said she thought it was a weird choice for the venue.
“It’s like a stadium. I get that no one can come inside but I think it’s a bit much blocking up the roads,” added Ellie, who attended the Eras tour in Sydney with her mom.
The two said they also thought it was odd Swift didn’t choose a venue or date that included her lucky number, 13, saying it “didn’t add up.”
“If she does get married, we wish her well,” Nguyen said. “We’d love to see her.”
Emma Rasco, 19, was also surprised by the choice in wedding venue.
“When I heard it, I was like, that’s definitely a choice,” Rasco said. “It’s a little unconventional and very forward-facing.”
Swift and Kelce announced their engagement in August after two years of dating, to much fanfare. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Swift wrote in the caption of her Instagram post.
While the Swift camp didn’t release a guest list, various news organizations staked out local hotels and began counting bold-face names headed to the event. The New York Times obtained a schedule for the wedding, which included a cocktail hour followed by a 5 p.m. wedding and reception. The event was set to end at 2 a.m.
The couple were first linked in July 2023, when Kelce mentioned his desire to meet the pop superstar on his podcast, “New Heights,” and made their relationship public that September. Their coupling instantly captured the attention and hearts of fans around the world, and Swift’s presence at Chiefs games was even credited with bolstering female interest in NFL football.
Kelly, 36, is a longtime Swift fan who said she grew up listening to her music. She came from her apartment on the Upper West Side to 33rd Street to see if she could catch a glimpse of Swift entering the stadium.
“I feel like I was the same peer group growing up with her, and am just so happy that she had her happy ending,” she said. “I want to see what a Royal American wedding looks like.”
Kelly said she admires Swift and Kelce for donating to charity. The couple donated a combined $26 million to 20 local and national charities ahead of their presumed nuptials, Swift’s publicist told Business Insider.
“They really are a positive influence,” she added.
Kelly said Madison Square Garden made sense as a venue for the privacy and security of guests.
“It’s not an ideal wedding venue but they’re both creative and have their own stages in a way,” she added.
By mid-afteroon Friday, dozens of fans clustered near MSG as black SUVs and vans with tinted windows, presumably filled with wedding attendees, turned the corner toward the stadium.
New York Police Department sources told The Times that streets will be blocked off all Friday and should return to normal by Saturday morning.
Back in October, Swift told TV host Graham Norton that she was casting a wide net with the guest list, joking that she would invite “anyone I’ve ever talked to.”
“I shouldn’t have said any of that,” she added.
Pulling off an event of this magnitude — which many described as America’s “royal wedding” — required considerable preparation, with a particular emphasis on privacy. Guests were reportedly required to sign nondisclosure agreements before receiving any event details (although the NDAs were said not to have included any penalties for violating the terms).
While the Swift camp didn’t release a guest list, various news organizations staked out local hotels and Madison Square Garden and began counting bold-face names headed to the event. The New York Times obtained a schedule for the wedding, which included a cocktail hour followed by a 5 p.m. wedding and reception. The event was set to end at 2 a.m.
The couple were also linked to wedding planner Mark Seed, who previously orchestrated the 2023 wedding of Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley and the 2019 wedding of Jennifer Lawrence and Cooke Maroney. Seed is known for his elaborate event builds and notable discretion.
On the Tuesday before the event, workers were photographed installing a red carpet outside of MSG, which one individual allegedly said was for “a wedding,” according to Page Six. It was quickly removed that same day.
Lin reported from New York; Garcia and Eloise Rollins-Fife from Los Angeles.
Since its creation more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been in the lamppost business and little else.
But in recent months, the little-known city agency has found itself pulled into a fierce debate over L.A.’s relationship with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that has been criticized for supplying data used to enable the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
In L.A., Flock operates dozens of automated license plate readers, which allow authorities to scan for vehicles that have been reported stolen or are registered to known fugitives, tracking their movements throughout the city.
The devices are often mounted on municipal light poles, which makes the Bureau of Street Lighting responsible for their installation.
Reports that Flock has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have prompted dozens of mostly smaller cities across the country to end their relationship with the company. But in L.A. it still has found willing customers, including the LAPD.
Hundreds of emails obtained by The Times through public records requests reveal how LAPD boosters, homeowner associations and elected officials have engaged in a months-long campaign to pressure the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up installations of the plate readers.
Flock, headquartered in Atlanta, said that it contracts with roughly 5,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies nationwide, and that its technology complies with a California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities. A company spokesperson said that Flock’s technology is “built around transparency, accountability, and local control.”
“Our customers own and control their data, which is deleted after 30 days by default,” the spokesperson, MoMo Zhou, said in a statement to The Times. “Our platform includes safeguards like audit trails to help ensure accountability at every step. Every day, Flock supports communities across the country in addressing crime and locating missing people.”
The Bureau of Street Lighting, with 177 employees and a relatively modest budget of $49.4 million, would seem an unlikely player in the broader debate over police surveillance. It is primarily tasked with repairing and fortifying the city’s more than 210,000 streetlamps — a frequent target of copper wire thieves — and maintaining its network of electrical vehicle charging stations.
The push to put up more plate readers has come amid calls for greater transparency around the Los Angeles Police Department’s dealings with Flock. In March, the Police Commission asked the department to report back on what information the company’s scanners collect and share. In recent months, the commission declined to approve donations of Flock cameras.
Members of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition held a news conference to express opposition to Flock Safety, a license plate reader, ahead of a Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners meeting on March 3, 2026.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The commission ordered its inspector general to conduct an audit of the LAPD’s use of license plate reader technology, with the findings expected to be released in the summer.
Recently, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion urging the commission to “refrain from entering into any new Memoranda of Understanding, Contracts, or other Agreements, or implement any pilot programs with Flock Safety or its affiliates.” LAPD officials said last month that the city attorney’s office has been working on drawing up a formal contract with Flock.
Behind the scenes, though, the pressure to work with Flock has been ratcheting up from other council offices and community groups.
When a representative from Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky’s office emailed the streetlighting bureau urging speed, she received a response that said the installation process shouldn’t be rushed because some city light poles can’t support the weight of a Flock reader, which is normally powered by a solar panel.
“The last thing we need is to have a pole fall onto someone or something if there are high winds,” the bureau’s Clinton Tsurui wrote in the June 4, 2025, email.
In another exchange, Tsurui expressed frustration with a colleague who had offered what he thought was an overly optimistic timetable for installing new plate readers.
He wrote: “smh, promising things we can’t do is going to catch up with us one day.”
The Los Angeles Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long bankrolled equipment for the LAPD and offered other support, has criticized delays in installing the Flock devices. Last year, the foundation facilitated the donation of dozens of Flock cameras, most of which ended up in affluent neighborhoods on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.
Records show that in May 2025, Dana Katz, the foundation’s executive director, reached out to the mayor’s office with a request to waive permit and rental fees associated with installing the new readers. Katz wrote in an email that the extra expense of around $2,000 per device were “cost prohibitive and detrimental to public safety.”
Katz also pointed out that in some places, there are no city-owned poles on which to mount the devices — but offered a possible solution.
“Flock has its own pole that has been accepted by the County of Los Angeles for these situations, and we would like the City to accept the use of them, too,” she wrote to Robert Clark, the city’s then-deputy mayor of public safety.
A few of L.A.’s historic streetlights stand outside the Bureau of Street Lighting’s office near Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Katz wrote Clark again on Aug. 6 to ask why officials were estimating a six-to-12-month wait for approval of new Flock readers on public property in the neighborhoods of Cheviot Hills and Brentwood Park, where there were no existing city poles to mount them. She noted that the county’s engineering department had already approved the company’s poles, and asked Clark whether there was a way for the city to “piggyback on these other entities’ approvals in order to speed this up so that these neighborhoods don’t have to wait so long for help in preventing these home invasions?”
In the following weeks, Katz’s emails took on an increasingly urgent tone. In one of her last messages, email records show, she told an aide she expected more help than the mayor’s office was offering.
“With all due respect, the answers you have provided are completely generic and do not provide any guidance and direction as to how we can expedite this process,” she wrote.
She added: “I’ve said it before, and I will say it again — these delays are harmful to public safety.”
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Times that ultimately neither Clark nor the aide intervened on the Los Angeles Police Foundation’s behalf.
Email records show Flock’s courtship of the bureau dates at least to spring 2024, when the company agreed to donate two of its plate readers to help combat copper thefts.
Tsurui emailed LAPD Capt. Celina Robles to say that the company’s executives had requested an in-person meeting with the bureau and the LAPD “to discuss the benefits of this product and how it can benefit the city moving forward.”
On June 24, 2024, a lobbyist from the D.C. firm Modern Fortis emailed Bureau of Street Lighting Executive Director Miguel Sangalang seeking to “explore a public-private partnership” between Flock and the city. Sangalang took another meeting to discuss Flock a few months later with former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino, who after leaving City Hall had gone to work for Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based lobbying firm.
In January 2025, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas, Flock stepped in again. The company agreed to donate more than 50 plate readers, free of charge for six months, to the wealthy Palisades area, where residents and law enforcement officials were on high alert about potential theft.
A Flock Safety automated license plate reader in Costa Mesa.
(Courtesy of the city of Costa Mesa)
In the days and weeks that followed, city and police officials continued to pepper the bureau about speeding up the approval process.
On Jan. 21, 2025, records show, Cmdr. Randall “Randy” Goddard of the LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau wrote streetlighting officials to say that the Palisades community “could use a big favor from your department.”
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell “fully supports this and has been working with the City Attorney’s office to finalize the terms,” Goddard wrote.
WASHINGTON — Thousands of people streamed onto the National Mall for a daylong prayer rally Sunday headlined by President Trump and billed as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”
Against the backdrop of the Washington Monument, worship music blared from a stage that made clear the event’s Christian focus. Arched stained-glass windows, set underneath grand columns resembling a federal building, depicted the nation’s founders alongside a white cross.
The nation’s tradition of separating church and state, however, was not on display. Most speakers celebrated Christianity’s ties to American history, a blending of ideas that critics decried before the gathering as Christian nationalism.
Trump read a passage of Scripture in a video shown at the rally. Filmed in the Oval Office, it was the same footage used during a marathon Bible-reading event last month. The verses from 2 Chronicles are often cited by those who claim America was founded as a Christian nation.
“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways,” Trump read, “then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
Other leading Republicans, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), were also on the schedule for the event, part of the celebrations marking the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Only one name on the Rededicate 250 program was not Christian. Most were among Trump’s longtime evangelical supporters, including Paula White-Cain of the White House Faith Office and evangelist Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse.
“We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom,” said the Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, a Baptist minister who leads the progressive Christian organization Sojourners.
The conservative Christian lineup featured guests who often assert that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, a narrative disputed by many historians and other religious traditions and inconsistent with American legal precedent.
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, noted the religious diversity of early America, including Jews, Muslims and Indigenous people. “I want to shine a light on America’s history as a nation that welcomes, celebrates and protects people of all faiths and those of no faith,” Pesner said.
‘It’s all about Jesus’
Many in the crowd wore Trump hats and patriotic colors, joining the festivities under a sweltering sun.
“It’s all about Jesus,” said Denny Smith, 72, of Rhode Island, who rented a motorized scooter to traverse the National Mall.
Retha Bond, a 58-year-old from southern Illinois, said she was here to hear Trump speak nearby on Jan. 6, 2021. She said she did not join the protesters who rioted later that day at the Capitol, attacking police officers while attempting to overturn the presidential election result, but she has remained a steadfast Trump supporter.
“I’m not saying Trump is the savior,” Bond said. But she said that “this is one of the most important things that could be going on in the world, for us to rededicate our nation back to God.”
At least one event speaker mentioned the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s activism has been a powerful example for Alessandra Seawright, 15, of Santa Fe, N.M., who came to Rededicate 250 with her mother.
“I think we just need more of this in our country, and we just need to share the word of the Lord,” she said. “We love going to events like this.”
They also attended Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which mixed Christian worship and political messages. Events like these, Seawright said, help her feel less alone in her conservative Christian beliefs.
Prayer event spurs protest
Hegseth, who has infused Christian language and worship with his role leading the Pentagon — drawing criticism — asked the gathering in a video to pray to “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Referencing George Washington’s faith, he said, “Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray for our nation on bended knee.”
Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Meir Soloveichik was the only non-Christian religious leader listed on the program. To applause, he told the crowd, “Antisemitism is utterly un-American” — a seeming reference to debates dividing the right.
Soloveichik serves on the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission along with White-Cain, Graham and Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron, Catholic clerics also featured on the program.
The event was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership backed by the White House. Congressional Democrats have questioned the nonprofit’s structure and finances, which they see as a Trump-controlled end run around a separate commission charted by Congress a decade ago to prepare semiquincentennial events.
Progressive groups staged counter-programming. Among them were the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which advocates a strict separation of church and state, and the Christian organization Faithful America. The two groups displayed a large balloon near the mall of a Trump-like golden calf, a biblical reference to idolatry.
On Thursday evening, the Interfaith Alliance projected protest slogans onto an exterior wall of the National Gallery of Art. “Democracy not theocracy,” said one. Another said: “The separation of church and state is good for both.”
Stanley writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Peter Smith in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.
