Corn dogs will fry. Pigs will parade. Butter cows will greet visitors from their climate-controlled enclosures. This month is go-time for Ferris wheels, bacon-wrapped beef on a stick and llamas dressed in costumes. For the first time since the pandemic laid waste to the business, state fairs across the U.S. will swing open their gates hoping disease and deficits are behind them. The big question is whether they can overcome higher prices, vendor worker shortages and lingering fear of Covid-19 to regain or surpass their pre-pandemic form.
“This whole year, everything about it has felt normal in a new world,” said Jerry Hammer, CEO of the Minnesota State Fair, second only to Texas in size and host to the llama costume contest, which also includes alpacas. “We’re in a much different place than we were three years ago. People are excited about the fair this year. The issues we have are typical, where they haven’t been for the last two years.”
State fairs seem like holdovers from a bygone era, when young love could blossom over stuffed bears won on the midway and the family heifer could come home with a surprise blue ribbon. But it’s also a big-dollar business, measured not just by ticket sales but by its impact on the vendors, the seasonal workers and the folks who live down the street and sell parking spots on their front lawns. The Minnesota fair estimates it contributed $268 million to the Twin Cities economy four years ago. Indiana says its fair’s economic impact is $200 million, while Iowa and Oklahoma each report an annual benefit in the range of $100 million. In Texas, where everything is bigger, fairgoers’ impact last year was $400 million even as attendance was down.
Minnesota fairgoers embrace the over 50 year tradition of the Giant Slide, which is 50 feet high and 150 feet long. There have been 42 built and one resides at the neighboring state fairgrounds in Iowa.
Minnesota State Fair
The number of yearly visitors to the Iowa State Fair tops 1 million, roughly one-third of the state’s population. Last year that fair, and the one in Indiana, saw attendance dip just 6% compared with pre-pandemic numbers. Minnesota wasn’t as lucky. Attendance, which peaked at 2.1 million pre-pandemic, fell 39% in 2021. That was after the closure of fairs nationwide in 2020 due to the spreading coronavirus.
“Last year, people just wanted to come to the fair. We just opened the gates,” Iowa State Fair CEO Gary Slater told Forbes. “This year’s a little different. Everybody’s open and trying to get you to spend your dollars with them all summer long. There’s more musical concerts than I’ve ever heard about in the Des Moines area this summer.”
A student of the Future Farmers of America shows livestock at the Iowa State Fair. There are more than 700,000 FFA members between ages 12 and 21 across the country.
Iowa State Fair
State fairs don’t typically receive public funding for operating budgets, though capital improvements might be paid for by sympathetic legislatures. The Minnesota State Fair, for example, is run by an organization of mostly county fairs around the state. Their job is to promote agriculture, provide a safe space for deep-frying food that’s never before been deep-fried, and make sure everyone has a good time.
To stay competitive, the Iowa fair has an operating budget this year of $34 million and plans to showcase pop acts like Demi Lovato, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, Skillet, Kane Brown and Nelly. That’s in addition to free entertainment such as husband-calling contests.
Minnesota, Iowa’s neighbor to the north, counters with Pitbull, The Beach Boys, Florida Georgia Line, REO Speedwagon, Styx, Diana Ross and the Zac Brown Band. The fair increased its operating budget this year, but only a little due to an abundance of caution.
“We’re expecting better attendance than last year, but we never plan for the best year ever,” Hammer told Forbes. “You can’t do that. There’s just way too many variables that can have an impact.” That said, Hammer, a 50-plus-year veteran of the Minnesota fair, said he expects attendance of 1.65 million compared with 1.3 million last year.
State fairs are one of the few industries that don’t compete with one another. That’s why, when Covid-19 hit, Cindy Hoye, executive director of the Indiana State Fair, contacted six Midwest fair executives to compare notes on how to survive the pandemic.
“The fair industry is one that really believes that we can learn from each other and nothing is really privileged information because people, for the most part, Hoosiers are the ones that are going to come to the Indiana State Fair and people from Wisconsin are going to prioritize the Wisconsin State Fair,” Hoye said. “We never really feel like we’re competing with those other fairs. It was really an opportunity to share information together and best practices.”
The Budweiser Clydesdales make an appearance at the Indiana State Fair. The well known steeds have trotted through many state fairs including Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, Kentucky and more.
Indiana State Fair
In the meetings, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky state fair operators discussed how to stay alive in 2020. “We’re resilient, but we’re not indestructible,” Hammer said. “We had to become very resourceful and cognizant of our role as stewards of these important institutions.”
Minnesota conducted “food parades” which allowed locals to drive through the fairgrounds and pick up their favorite foods from 24 vendors. While it was nothing like the normal 300 vendors, the events helped pay for a few months of the fair’s expenses. Indiana didn’t have its usual $30 million budget, but put on a volunteer-based livestock show for 4-H and Future Farmers of America exhibitors.
The fairgrounds also provided critical services to their communities. Operators allowed the facilities to be used for Covid-19 vaccination clinics, testing sites, and in Iowa’s case, a dormitory for homeless people who tested positive.
“We’ve been through some ups and downs in our history and we have a very solid can-do approach,” Hoye told Forbes. “We have to be creative and bold. And those were the two words we went into the pandemic with and we still use those two words to represent our common purpose of building traditions and making memories. But it’s being creative and solution-oriented with bold strokes.”
As far as Covid is concerned, masks are no longer required and capacity restrictions have been discarded. Still, Indiana will stay closed on Mondays and Tuesdays to sanitize the facilities.
Fifty-two years after he worked his first Minnesota State Fair, Hammer said he believes the event is more crucial than ever. “We bring people together like nobody else,” he said. “Like nowhere else.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahmuller/2022/08/14/state-fairs-hope-to-put-disease-and-deficits-behind-them-in-their-first-full-throttle-season-since-covid/