You know what really frosts my flakes?
Taking my grandchildren to the Texas State Fair and discovering I needed to take out a second job to pay for it.
Admission was $25 per person, plus a $2 convenience fee for buying tickets online.
Not $2 per order. Oh, no! That’s $2 for EVERY ticket!
Apparently, the computer has to work extra hard to process each ticket.
And if you want the convenience of attending on any day you choose, that’s another $2 per ticket.
But here’s what really gets me. Senior admission is $7 on Thursdays, $13 Monday through Wednesday and $20 on weekends.
Why? Do old people suddenly become more expensive on weekends? We certainly don’t go on more nausea-inducing rides.
Then there’s parking. Another $25 to park so far away you need a shuttle to get to a trolley to get to the entrance. I was beginning to wonder if we needed to book a connecting flight.
Once inside, you discover that cash is apparently worthless. Everything requires coupons. Food, drinks, games and rides. Every coupon costs $1.
My son-in-law bought $105 worth of coupons.
That got us two corn dogs, a rib basket, two slushies, an ice cream bar, a bag of cotton candy and four rides for my 6-year-old grandson.
And here’s the real beauty of the coupon system. When it was time to leave, we still had a bunch of coupons left over.
But there was nothing affordable near the exit where we could spend them.
So, now we had a choice. Walk another mile to find something we didn’t need or leave with coupons we couldn’t use.
It’s like buying Monopoly money, except the banker gets to keep your real money when the game is over!
We thought about taking the whole family on the giant Ferris wheel.
Until we discovered it cost $14 PER PERSON!
That Ferris wheel has 42 cars. With just two people per car, that’s $1,176 every time they fill it up for a 10-minute ride.
For that kind of money, I expect the ride to include a tour of downtown Dallas and a complimentary steak dinner!
And forget the carnival games. Five dollars to throw ONE dart at ONE balloon. Six dollars to squirt water at a target for 45 seconds.
At those prices, I’d better win the entire stuffed animal factory!
But here’s what bothered me most.
When I was a kid, state fairs celebrated the best things people grew, raised, built and created.
You could see prizewinning livestock, giant pumpkins, beautiful quilts, woodworking projects and homemade pies.
Admission was affordable because the whole point was to get families inside to experience those things.
At the Texas State Fair, nearly everything we saw was somebody trying to sell us something.
Cars, hot tubs, cookware, lotions and enough gadgets to fill a shopping mall.
We found one display with baby animals, but couldn’t find the competitive exhibits.
Maybe they were there. But the signage was so lousy, we would have needed a GPS, a bloodhound and a search-and-rescue team to locate them.
I’m Grandpa Grumpy, and somewhere along the way, the state fair stopped being a celebration of agriculture, craftsmanship and community.
It became a giant cash register with a Ferris wheel attached.
And the only blue ribbon I saw was for creative ways to separate grandparents from their money!