2020 Minnesota State Fair canceled due to coronavirus

KARE 11 TV News ^ | 6:37 PM CDT May 22, 2020 | Jeremiah Jacobsen

[SamAdams76]

I like going to state fairs. We get all the beers and we check out the horses, the pigs, the chickens and the cows. There is always some old Top 40 act playing there like Sanford Townsend Band, Juice Newton or Marshall Tucker.

Then there is Dan the Candy Man, deep-fried Twinkies, actual waxy honey comb that we eat on the spot and carnival games in which we try to throw an overinflated basketball into a tiny hoop in order to win some kind of stuffed animal.

After a few beers, I might get up the gumption to ride the rickety Ferris Wheel.

[abigkahuna]

Ha! You got that right....so our fairs have cancelled. Quickly we needed to pivot to an e-commerce presence. Setting up easy to use plug and play isn’t always easy...Anyway, we are switching from fairs to web sales. Mostly relatives right now..Bless them. But we do have fair customers that we do special orders for throughout the years.

We checked out Etsy. That is ding city. Whoa baby. Would rather go it alone and start on Facebook and expand later to google. (yeah, yeah I know) But surprisingly, our customer base is on FB, as they are older and for the most part conservative...

The folks that are having a hard time are the entertainers. Absolutely no bookings.. Fresno is going to open in October, so there is that. I will be there as paid entertainement. The Washington State Fair is said to open and run the month of September. I will be there with our product booth....

Otherwise it is tough. The funny thing is...all of our web sales I have to declare and it goes against our unemployment check. Fine. Whatever. So I declare it. As long as money is coming in from somewhere, right? I will have to laugh when the I declare a day’s fair pay against the $167/wk I am getting for unemployment. They are going to think I am a drug dealer or something..

It will be good to get back to work. But the fair season is not an on and off thing. It is like a river that starts slow and then builds to a crescendo as it goes off the falls in a great powerful force... Spring events pay for the early summer events which pay for product for the late summer crescendo events....So, it will be interesting. Been doing this for 25 years-—going out on the road. Don’t know anything else. As the famed Jimmy Z once said to me...”we live the life others can only dream...”

May all your lots be green.