It's a heuristic. Furthermore, the brown M&Ms clause was buried deep in a list of technical riders. The person in charge of the green room isn't reading the te

It's a heuristic. Furthermore, the brown M&Ms clause was buried deep in a list of technical riders. The person in charge of the green room isn't reading the technical part of the contract at all. Why would they? It's not their job. They're reading the other part of the contract that plainly says "please put a bowl of M&Ms in the green room". So the only two cases in which a venue is going to pick out the M&Ms is... 1. The technical director saw the requirement and told the green room guy to start picking out M&Ms or the show is cancelled 2. The green room guy somehow knows about the brown M&Ms thing and decides to falsely signal compliance Presumably, the whole brown M&Ms thing was obscure enough that no venue actually decided to just check for odd requirements. Furthermore, if they did decide to just do that and only that, specifically knowing that they were interfering with such a heuristic, they'd almost certainly be liable for something. So I doubt anyone would deliberately interfere with this, and it's hard to accidentally comply with just the no brown M&Ms thing. "Just line-check the production all the time" might not always be an option.