839: Meet Me at the Fair

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Speaker 1 A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Speaker 4 The state of Iowa has a little more than three million people.

Speaker 4 One million come to the state fair.

Speaker 4 Strolling past the swine barn and the kids' talent show stage and the lemonade shake-up stands and the many, many corn dog stands and the central Iowa Railroad Club exhibit building and the chainsaw art and the live snakes and the vast slowly moving rivers of people.

Speaker 4 Every one of those million is here on their own personal quest for what they want out of the fair. Stuff they want to do, stuff they want to see.
Everybody has their own mission.

Speaker 4 Declan and Killian, for instance, seven to nine years old.

Speaker 4 Brothers from the suburb of Des Moines.

Speaker 5 They

Speaker 4 want to see the giant bull.

Speaker 5 Killian, the big brother.

Speaker 4 Talk to my co-worker Diane Wu.

Speaker 6 Why are you so excited to see the bull?

Speaker 7 Oh, it's one of my favorite animals.

Speaker 8 How How come?

Speaker 7 They can see red, and red's my favorite color.

Speaker 9 What? You said it was black like every day.

Speaker 4 That's little brother Dekwan with a fact-check about Killian's favorite color being black. Another fact-check?

Speaker 4 Bulls can't actually see red.

Speaker 4 The boys wander around the outside of the cattle barn, looking for the red entrance.

Speaker 11 Super sized bull.

Speaker 8 That way.

Speaker 4 The bull's name is Teddy Bear. It weighs 3,060 pounds.

Speaker 4 Signs duct taped onto the pen say, say, Do not touch the bull. Which is like,

Speaker 8 yeah.

Speaker 3 What do you think?

Speaker 13 That's cool

Speaker 9 and big.

Speaker 9 I thought it would be smaller.

Speaker 8 That'd be smaller. Okay.
A little bit.

Speaker 4 When you see a giant animal, if you're a kid or an adult, what is there to say

Speaker 8 other than

Speaker 8 yeah, okay,

Speaker 8 that's about right.

Speaker 8 Elsewhere.

Speaker 14 Cowboy mounted shooting is one of the fastest-growing equestrian sports in the country. It's a timed event where we use two 45 single-action long bolt pistols.

Speaker 4 In the cowboy mounted shooting competition, each competitor is on horseback and they ride a course shooting burning embers from their guns.

Speaker 4 They try to pop five balloons with one pistol, then they change guns, shoot five more balloons with the other pistol, and gallop to the finish line all without stopping.

Speaker 14 Some of these runs we're going to be doing today are going to be nine seconds because that's less than a second per shot with a gun change. It's a lot happening all at once.

Speaker 4 Adam Ross is actually ranked sixth in the world at this sport. But somehow he has never won first place here in his home state of Iowa.
That's his mission for this year's fair.

Speaker 4 I told my coworker Ike Shries Condoraja.

Speaker 14 I'm naturally competitive. When everybody else puts their horses away in the winter, me and my wife take our horses to the barn and we ride all winter long.

Speaker 14 We try to outwork every one of our competitors.

Speaker 4 When you survey this room of competitive riders in your level, who's the one you're most keeping an eye on?

Speaker 14 I look right in the mirror at myself. I know that I'm the fastest one here.
I have the horse that's the most proven here this year.

Speaker 14 So as long as I don't beat myself and I go out there and run my match, I know that there's nobody that'll compete with me.

Speaker 14 I'll be with you till we meet again.

Speaker 14 Keep love spreading floating on

Speaker 14 you.

Speaker 4 It's a slightly slower pace over at the replica of Iowa's first first church. The original was built in 1834.

Speaker 4 It's a cozy log cabin, where the goal is to reflect on God's goodness, right in the middle of a gigantic, noisy carnival. They hold services twice a day during the fair.

Speaker 4 While Iowans are not officially permitted to pray, but they are, the guy leading the service says, allowed to sing prayers.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 4 High above nearly everything at this fair, looking down on everyone, stands Bionda, age 11, on the giant slide for her very first time.

Speaker 4 It is a massive metal slide that you fly down on a felt mat, and she has a simple goal of her own.

Speaker 8 So we're going to go on the slide, and I'm very terrified right now because one round move and I'm done.

Speaker 4 Then, she and her sister Sally grab their mats and push off.

Speaker 4 The Varied Industries Building is an enjoyable mismash of t-shirts and household stuff for sale, but also expensive devices to help your blood circulation or your horse's blood circulation.

Speaker 4 Plus, a guy on one of the more surprising missions at the fair, I thought.

Speaker 5 Marty Golden.

Speaker 4 In a neatly pressed blue uniform and Navy hat, who was standing in front of a booth promoting the USS Iowa battleship, a World War II-era ship. It's now a floating museum.

Speaker 4 Its restoration paid for in part by grants from the state of Iowa.

Speaker 16 We want to make the citizens of Iowa more aware of the battleship Iowa and let them know that anybody that's a resident of the state of Iowa gets on board the Iowa battleship for free.

Speaker 16 And if they let us know they're from Iowa, we'll take them behind the scenes to places that are not open up to the general public.

Speaker 4 But there's a catch.

Speaker 4 Iowa happens to be landlocked. The ship is docked in Los Angeles.
Hence, Marty's mission, to get Iowans out there.

Speaker 4 Marty did two years in the Navy, 30 years in the reserves. He served on a ship right off the coast of Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Speaker 4 He's also a marine biologist who studied ocean life.

Speaker 8 He's retired now.

Speaker 4 But he loved the Navy enough that now he's a tour guide on the Iowa,

Speaker 4 which again is in the port of Los Angeles.

Speaker 4 Marty is not an Iowan. He lives out there.

Speaker 16 I miss the Navy so much that I volunteer now about once a week down in the battleship, Iowa.

Speaker 4 And they flew you out here?

Speaker 8 More or less.

Speaker 4 Oh, you flew yourself out here?

Speaker 16 I contributed a substantial amount of the effort to get out here.

Speaker 4 So basically you said, let me go and do this. It'll be fun.
And they're like, great.

Speaker 16 Yeah, they probably would have covered all of my expenses, but I believe in the ship.

Speaker 16 The ship is

Speaker 16 always struggling to bring money in to keep operating.

Speaker 4 So you didn't want to take any money away that could have gone to the battleship? Correct.

Speaker 4 The Iowa State Fair began in 1854, just eight years after Iowa became a state. They hadn't even picked a location to build their state capitol building yet.

Speaker 4 But they wanted to come together for a fair, for reasons that aren't that different from why we do it today.

Speaker 4 And what are they?

Speaker 4 I think at a state fair, so much of what's on exhibit is us.

Speaker 4 We come.

Speaker 4 The animals we raised, our pies and sewing projects, our spelling beast skills, and our expertise at shooting balloons from horseback, and our love for a Navy Museum battleship, and we think others would love also if we could just tell them about it in person.

Speaker 4 We take in the exhibits, and we are the exhibits at a state fair. That's what's so different about a state fair from everything else.

Speaker 4 Last summer, we went to the Iowa State Fair to hang out with some of the 1 million people there to see if they got what they wanted from the fair.

Speaker 4 This year's Iowa State Fair starts up this week, so it seemed like a perfect time to bring those stories back. From WB Easy Chicago, it's this American Life.

Speaker 5 I'm Ira Glass.

Speaker 4 Stay with us.

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Speaker 4 This is American Life, AC1,

Speaker 4 Carney Confidential.

Speaker 4 So Bailey Lovett has a different relationship to state fairs and carnivals for most of us.

Speaker 18 It always feels good to be back on a Midway. When I come out here, I smell it.
It just feels like home to me.

Speaker 8 Bailey grew up in carnivals.

Speaker 4 Comes from a family of Carneys. Wait, I'm smelling.
What is the smell you're talking about?

Speaker 18 So I smell turkey legs for sure.

Speaker 18 I could smell the cotton candy, that burnt sugar smell.

Speaker 18 And there's always like an underlying kind of grease smell, the diesel smell from the rides and from the generator, which is giving power to all the rides.

Speaker 18 It's so comforting to me.

Speaker 4 Bailey wrote on Instagram that we were going to be doing this show about state fairs. And she wrote in, talking about her family's life on the road as Carney's, mostly out west.

Speaker 4 I thought it would be fun to walk through the midway with her and see it through her eyes.

Speaker 4 Because she notices all kinds of stuff, big and little, that you and I don't know enough to notice.

Speaker 4 She grew up with a different vocabulary for everything around us here. She calls all the games joints.

Speaker 18 Well, it's a four-sided joint, but then three-sided.

Speaker 4 Cut and candy stands are poppers. Food stands are grabs.

Speaker 8 Prizes are flash.

Speaker 4 Carnivals themselves are shows. As in.

Speaker 18 He's actually still on that show, and I think he's managing rides.

Speaker 4 A bunch of different shows. 13 independent companies provide the games and rides for the Iowa State Fair.
We walk up to a balloon game that must be, I don't know, 20, 25 feet tall.

Speaker 4 A structure made from aluminum scaffolding, with flags and prizes hanging everywhere, and two giant banners saying, bust one wins. Bailey gives a once over.

Speaker 4 She's impressed.

Speaker 18 You can tell that they take good care of the joint, because you see how clean all this stuff is, where all those connection points are.

Speaker 4 You're pointing to the frame of the stand itself.

Speaker 18 The joints where different pieces link up for this game. All that stuff is really well maintained.

Speaker 4 Bailey tries to spot who's greenhelp and who's a 40-miler. That means just there for a bit.
And who's a genuine carnie.

Speaker 4 Before I met Bailey, I honestly wasn't just sure if people still use the word carny, or if it has some sort of derogatory, old-timey feeling to it.

Speaker 4 She told me some Carneys hate the word, but she and her family embrace it with pride.

Speaker 4 These days, Bailey works for a little software company that her mom started.

Speaker 4 Two of Bailey's brothers and her sister are still on the show, and her dad and stepmother run a show in Alaska that her dad tries to pull her back into now and then.

Speaker 4 Bailey has happy memories growing up, running around carnivals and state fairs.

Speaker 4 She could ride any ride or play any game for free, surrounded by adults, her parents' employees, who kept their eyes on her.

Speaker 4 There were incredibly special days like Stock Day when the stuffed animals for the fair, the stock, would arrive on a giant semi-trailer truck.

Speaker 18 And it was a giant pile of toys that I could literally jump in and swim in like a ball pit but with stuffed animals. That was my favorite.

Speaker 4 Bailey started to work in the fair for real when she was 10, working a goldfish game.

Speaker 18 A four-sided center joint.

Speaker 4 Bailey's mom Tina joined us for a a while in the Midway. She was watching Bailey's Baby while Bailey and I walked around.

Speaker 4 Tina co-managed the family carnival for years. She jokes that her kids learned to count by counting money.

Speaker 4 She says Bailey was great at drawing a crowd, loved the attention, loved performing.

Speaker 8 When she was little,

Speaker 4 her flaw is an employee.

Speaker 4 She did not care about convincing people to spend more money on the game.

Speaker 6 She would sit there and talk to people.

Speaker 6 And sometimes she would get in trouble because if she's talking to people, she's not actually making money.

Speaker 6 She's just talking to to people but then as she got older she focused a little bit better but

Speaker 18 weird that your child labor didn't pay off what you thought it would child labor laws do not apply to family and they learned that very young

Speaker 6 is that true it is true at least that's what i told them and they believed me so i was actually right about that one

Speaker 4 Something I didn't think about too deeply as a civilian fairgoer working for fun is that for the people working the fair, it really is all about money.

Speaker 4 How much you can make and how quickly and efficiently you can bring it in. Among other things, the state fair is a collection of small businesses attracted by the massive crowds.

Speaker 4 And among the people like Bailey, who work games and rides, the workers who make the most money are called agents.

Speaker 4 The word agent means different things in different regions of the country among carneys, but where Bailey was a carney, agents were just the best there was.

Speaker 4 So good at getting families and guys trying to oppress their girlfriends to throw money at games that carnival owners would pay them more than anybody else. And they would jump from show to show.

Speaker 4 Their agents as in free agents.

Speaker 4 As we walked through the fairgrounds, the thing that Bailey wanted to show me more than anything

Speaker 18 was an agent.

Speaker 18 Yeah, so an agent is someone who can do what we call putting a mark to sleep, where they're going to be able to kind of put you in this state where all you want to do is continue playing their game.

Speaker 18 You want to work towards whatever prize they have you working towards, whether it's topping balloons or knocking over milk bottles or whatever,

Speaker 18 you're gonna spend way more money than you planned on at that game. And whenever you get somebody in that state, if you're able to do it really well, it's called putting a mark to sleep.

Speaker 4 Bay Leonard's stepdad once watched an agent who put a mark to sleep so well that he spent all of his money, left the game, and then came back with more money.

Speaker 18 I'm getting chills as I talk about it. I've never seen anybody do that.
Once a mark leaves your game, usually they're awake and it's done.

Speaker 8 I

Speaker 4 wanted to see this.

Speaker 4 I wanted to see an operator, put somebody to sleep. So we headed out in search of an agent.

Speaker 18 There's going to be a lot of agents here.

Speaker 21 Come on, Athene. Come on in, guys.
Who else wants to have some water gun finds today?

Speaker 4 We head over to a game where there's a row of 14 chairs in front of 14 targets. The way this game works is you sit, fire a water pistol at the target.

Speaker 4 When you hit the the bullseye, the water goes into a tube, filling it up. First player to fill their tube wins a stuffed dial.

Speaker 21 Alright.

Speaker 22 Yeah, number one.

Speaker 4 Zong pauses your hearing.

Speaker 4 Bawe disapproves.

Speaker 21 Alright.

Speaker 4 This guy's trying to get people to sit and play the game.

Speaker 4 Three players sit.

Speaker 14 Alright. And a fourth.

Speaker 4 Ten seats are empty.

Speaker 21 Last call for this race at the sound of the bell of the water. We'll start.
Everybody ready? In three, two, one. Here we go.
Go, baby, baby. All the way to the top.
Keep your eye in the front.

Speaker 21 Don't worry, it's not this water race and the water is chasing the day.

Speaker 12 Number eight, winner, winner, winner.

Speaker 4 So what do you think of him?

Speaker 23 He's okay.

Speaker 18 He's not the best I've seen, but he's not the worst.

Speaker 13 Like,

Speaker 19 he's doing good at trying to engage people and make them play.

Speaker 10 But he's had a lot of pauses where he's not talking at all.

Speaker 4 Bailey knows this particular game well, the Water Race. She's been the one on the mic, running the Water Race for her dad's carnival in Alaska.

Speaker 4 She also have to do lots of rhyming when you're on the mic, lots of alliteration. Like, watch him race him, watch him chase him.

Speaker 8 That's one she did.

Speaker 4 This guy does not do much of that.

Speaker 18 Also, he's only getting three to four players each time.

Speaker 4 Do you think he can be pulling in more people?

Speaker 18 Absolutely, yeah. It's a nice game.
It has great stock. The joint looks really nice, really clean, but they could be making a lot more money, in my opinion.

Speaker 4 Do you think this guy is an agent?

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 19 Definitely not.

Speaker 4 We cross the fairgrounds to find another water race game.

Speaker 8 And this one's huge and beautiful.

Speaker 4 26 seats instead of 14, like the first one. It's what Bailey calls a double-sided journey.

Speaker 4 There are two rows of chairs facing each other.

Speaker 4 And the guy on the mic stands in the middle on a platform between the two rows.

Speaker 4 Huge fluffy prizes hanging everywhere.

Speaker 8 And the guy on the mic.

Speaker 22 Get ready, get sick. Go, go, go, go.

Speaker 22 All right, don't waste a drippity drop trying to get to the tippity top. Stop watching, see who's it gonna be.

Speaker 19 Hey, the winner is right there.

Speaker 18 All about rhyming.

Speaker 8 18.

Speaker 8 Number 18.

Speaker 18 Winner, winner, winner. He's constantly talking.
He's using a lot of alliteration and rhyming and like catchy things to draw people in.

Speaker 4 Even I can tell.

Speaker 4 This guy's got charisma. He's a stocky, bald guy with five o'clock shadow.
When he's on the mic, you cannot look away.

Speaker 8 And that great, gruff, rock and roll voice.

Speaker 22 Get ready, get set, go, go, go.

Speaker 22 Who's it gonna be? Stop watching. See? Oh, man, it's close.
It's neck to neck. It's toe-to-toe.
Don't waste the trippity drop.

Speaker 23 Winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner.

Speaker 22 Chicken dinner.

Speaker 18 Yeah, this setup is great.

Speaker 19 They've got really like hyped up music, flashing lights. They also got their mic turned up, so his voice is a lot more clear than that other guy.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 he's playing off his customers.

Speaker 23 He's joking around with them.

Speaker 25 Yeah, he's good at what he does.

Speaker 4 Billy's mom, former carnival manager.

Speaker 4 She's watching him too.

Speaker 18 He's not a 40-miler. He's a carney.

Speaker 4 I do get the guy to talk to me and go to snatches of conversation while winners are picking their prizes.

Speaker 4 His name's Jeremy Bouvier.

Speaker 13 How long have you been doing this?

Speaker 14 24 years.

Speaker 4 How many months of a year do you work?

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 Work all year.

Speaker 4 Do you have a house or apartment somewhere that's your?

Speaker 26 I had an apartment up until January.

Speaker 8 I got tired of paying for it because I'm always gone.

Speaker 26 I'm buying a motorhome in November.

Speaker 4 So if you have a motorhome, then you'll just take the motorhome with you as you travel? Yeah.

Speaker 4 What city was the apartment in?

Speaker 26 Lewiston, Maine. That's where I'm from.

Speaker 4 And who do you travel with?

Speaker 26 I go, I bounce around.

Speaker 4 That's right. So this isn't, you don't just travel with this ride? No.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 4 And you're staying in bunks here?

Speaker 26 No, I stay at hotels.

Speaker 8 So you're doing good?

Speaker 4 What percentage are they paying you of the gross here?

Speaker 26 I can't tell you that.

Speaker 14 It's good money though.

Speaker 4 So are you an agent?

Speaker 26 Pretty much.

Speaker 8 Alright, I gotta get back to work though.

Speaker 25 He's with us.

Speaker 18 He's an agent. You heard him talking about how he floats around and he just goes to different shows.
He doesn't travel with any particular show.

Speaker 18 That's all agent stuff.

Speaker 18 Staying in hotels, agent.

Speaker 18 Agent all the way. Not talking about money, agent.
That's all agent movies.

Speaker 4 So we saw an agent. But the truth is, we never got to see him really do his thing, full force, because it was after 8 p.m.

Speaker 4 This section of the fair, Keddie Land, was dying down.

Speaker 4 So he never filled more than half the seats in his game. We didn't see him put anybody to sleep.

Speaker 5 We keep him playing and spending money.

Speaker 4 But there was one more person Bailey and I watched. He was not, strictly speaking, fellow Carney.

Speaker 4 He was a salesman.

Speaker 4 Traveling salesman.

Speaker 4 But Bailey and I both watched him mesmerized.

Speaker 4 And he was in one of the prime spots that anybody could possibly get at this state fair for selling anything.

Speaker 4 This was outside the Varied Industries Building

Speaker 4 next to the door.

Speaker 4 And also at the corner of the building.

Speaker 4 So he saw him approaching from two different directions.

Speaker 4 The Iowa State Fair charges a bunch of extra money for that spot,

Speaker 14 of of course.

Speaker 4 This guy was calmly making bank.

Speaker 4 Kenny Brunel,

Speaker 4 he sells nozzles for garden hoses.

Speaker 27 Well, I have them in any color you want as long as it's green.

Speaker 4 Some agents, Bailey says, are high-energy,

Speaker 4 but some

Speaker 4 are the opposite.

Speaker 4 They win

Speaker 8 through calm.

Speaker 4 That's Kenny.

Speaker 4 And okay, just to describe his setup, he's standing next to a clear glass box that's maybe two feet by two feet by two feet.

Speaker 4 Spraying water into it with a garden hose whose nozzle Kenny twists clockwise or counterclockwise to make the spray bigger, smaller.

Speaker 27 Going from left to right, you're going to have a little soft soak for potted plants. You got a heavy rinse.
You can get the house, the car, the windows. You got a wide fan.

Speaker 27 As you turn it, it will go down to a pinpoint dead spray that'll clean the windows, the siding, and the gutters. And last but not least, you got a fine mist for delicate plants.

Speaker 18 This guy, he puts people to sleep. He's putting marks to sleep.
That's what he's doing.

Speaker 25 And he's good at it.

Speaker 18 Like, even his voice is kind of hypnotic. Kind of like getting them in the zone.

Speaker 4 We stare at him as he puts people to sleep.

Speaker 27 And if you guys need a second one for the backyard, we do two for 75. You guys like to feel it as well.

Speaker 6 We bought one, then we bought another, now we're going to buy another. Thank you.

Speaker 18 I appreciate that. He's got a great visual presentation.

Speaker 18 But he's just really, like, he has really calm energy. and so you feel like this is a comforting guy, safe.

Speaker 18 So, yeah, of course, he's gonna make the sale.

Speaker 4 They have a new group of customers. Kenny hits the product against the ground, show how durable it is.
He makes the same jokes.

Speaker 27 And I haven't been any color you want as long as it's green.

Speaker 13 No purple. No purple yet.

Speaker 4 And he gets a minute between customers to talk. Kenny Brunel tells me that his grandfather sold at state fairs.
And his father,

Speaker 4 his own first memory of selling, is doing a salsa maker demo at the Colorado State Fair one time with his dad when he was five and a half.

Speaker 5 So they almost enjoyed it.

Speaker 4 When he was 10, he toured with his parents to state fairs and had his own booth

Speaker 4 selling radio-controlled cars.

Speaker 4 As he got older, he learned to demo kitchen products and was pretty decent at it.

Speaker 27 But in my early teens, I was like, my heart's really not into kitchen gadgets. You know, just not something I felt.

Speaker 27 And then I took a liking to this product and I was like, I want to sell that.

Speaker 4 He wanted to sell that because it has a great visual pitch.

Speaker 8 It's a quick pitch.

Speaker 4 Also, the water is loud, it's attention getting.

Speaker 4 There's a wow moment when you hit the jet spray. There's another wow moment when you go to the mist.

Speaker 4 And another advantage of these things,

Speaker 4 they're tiny.

Speaker 27 You know, you can fit a whole fair's worth of inventory on one pallet.

Speaker 4 A quick trade show, he can check all the nozzles he needs into a carry-on bag. Way better, he says, than when he sold pillows.
That was 24 years ago when he started selling these.

Speaker 4 Some of his moves today, of course, he doesn't stop talking. Of course, he puts the product in the customer's hand.
That's something he saw his dad do.

Speaker 4 He's learned that to talk for 12 hours straight for a week and a half for a state fair, to preserve his voice, he'll consciously pitch it a little higher or a little lower for stretches at a time.

Speaker 4 Here in the Midwest, and also in certain cities like Seattle, he said, He mostly does not make direct eye contact during the pitch. Yes, I am.
And notice that.

Speaker 27 I was taught and raised to always make direct eye contact.

Speaker 27 What I found nowadays is I'll make eye contact roughly three times a demo. That's what I aim for.

Speaker 27 One in the beginning, one in the middle, one right at the end when you're explaining the warranty and how much they are, but not too much because I've done that a few times this fair where I'm making, you know, I'm demoing and doing it like you know, East Coast style, you know, making direct eye contact and you can see them kind of like looking off down the aisle and they're just, they're intimidated.

Speaker 27 And I don't want that.

Speaker 4 It's too aggressive to do the icon.

Speaker 13 It's too aggressive, yeah.

Speaker 4 Kenny, this is uh this is Bailey, who's worked at a ton of fairs, a ton of carnivals.

Speaker 19 I grew up in carnivals, so okay.

Speaker 18 I just think you're great at what you do.

Speaker 13 Thank you, appreciate that. Yeah,

Speaker 4 and then

Speaker 22 we got into a little chat

Speaker 4 about headset microphones.

Speaker 4 Bailey wanted to know why I didn't use one.

Speaker 5 Kenny was like, I usually do, but I had a problem with my mic.

Speaker 4 Maybe I didn't, and then a problem with my backup mic.

Speaker 8 I had a little issue. I usually get a lot of money.

Speaker 4 Bailey was sympathetic.

Speaker 8 They liked each other.

Speaker 4 One of them gave out early in the fair game. Recognizes game.

Speaker 4 In my line of work, I have to say, putting somebody to sleep means you are not doing your job right. It's one of the worst things you can say to somebody.

Speaker 4 When I told Kenny that's what Bailey said about him, he laughed and decided to take it as the compliment it was.

Speaker 4 He ended up selling $33,000 worth of nozzles over the course of the fair. That's 877 nozzles in 11 days.
Or, put it another way, for 12 hours a day, every single day.

Speaker 4 Kenny sold an average of one hose nozzle every 10 minutes.

Speaker 4 Coming up, we go in a roller coaster of sorts, one filled with bunnies.

Speaker 8 That's a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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Speaker 8 Just American Live from Iraq Glass today's show.

Speaker 4 Meet me at the fair. Last year we hung out with some of the 1.2 million people who came out to the Iowa State Fair to see if they got what they hoped for.

Speaker 4 The fair is starting up again this week, so we are bringing those stories back. And we'll get back to that in a second, but first, let me tell you a story.

Speaker 4 Back in 2013, the band Motlike Crew was getting older. One of his founding members had gotten a degenerative disease.

Speaker 5 The drummer, Tommy Glee,

Speaker 4 was going around saying they wanted to stop doing shows before they had to start replacing bandmates.

Speaker 29 That's such a bad look when

Speaker 29 bands are still playing the fairgrounds, you know.

Speaker 8 A year later, Tomi Lee said

Speaker 4 we are not playing county fairs.

Speaker 4 But Wednesday night at the Iowa State Fair this year, Marie Cruz played.

Speaker 4 They rocked. Fans partied.

Speaker 31 Legalized Coke.

Speaker 25 How was the show?

Speaker 10 Huh? How was the show?

Speaker 23 Turn up so drunk.

Speaker 13 I can't remember that.

Speaker 4 Curious about what it is like for the band to do this thing that they had sworn repeatedly they would never ever do, we asked for an interview. The band said yes.

Speaker 4 And then, a day later, we were told they would still love to talk to us with one condition.

Speaker 4 They would not discuss playing state fairs.

Speaker 5 In other words, Motley Crew

Speaker 4 is chicken.

Speaker 4 So, I just want to say to the band right now, our offer is still good. We actually do want to hear what this is like for you to do this.

Speaker 4 Reach out if you change your minds. With that, we turn to Act 2 of our show.

Speaker 4 Act 2, How Bad Is Your Bunny?

Speaker 4 So many people who come to the fair arrive with dreams tied to farmyard animals. There are non-stop animal competitions in hundreds of categories, all 11 days of the fair.

Speaker 4 One of our co-workers, Dana Chivis, went to watch the 4-H Rabbit competition. She had no idea what an emotional roller coaster it would turn out to be.

Speaker 4 The 4-H Rabbit program is meant to teach kids lessons about animal science and breeding and caretaking, which they do learn, along with some other lessons. Here's Dana.

Speaker 32 The rabbit show takes place in an industrial building on the outskirts of the fair. Tin roof, beige metal siding, no frills.
Rabbits don't get the respect they deserve, except from the kids.

Speaker 8 Hello.

Speaker 32 Hi, I'm Dana.

Speaker 33 Um, I'm Molly Fox.

Speaker 32 Molly has shown rabbits at the county fair before, but this is her first year at the state fair, the big time.

Speaker 32 She's waiting in line to present the incredibly fuzzy black rabbit in her arms, a breed called Lionhead, named for the poof of mane it's supposed to have around its head.

Speaker 32 This competition is about presentation skills, demonstrating your knowledge about your animal's breed to a panel of three judges. Molly tells me she's not nervous.

Speaker 32 She carries her bunny to the judge's table.

Speaker 18 Alright, you may start whenever you are ready.

Speaker 33 Hi, my name is Molly Fox.

Speaker 35 I'm 12 years old and I'm from Hamilton County.

Speaker 34 This is Onyx.

Speaker 35 He is a junior buck

Speaker 35 lionhead and his color is black.

Speaker 35 First, I'm going to check the ears.

Speaker 36 Um

Speaker 35 Let me find the ear tattoo. There's so much fluff.

Speaker 32 Molly flips Onyx onto his back and opens his little rabbit mouth so his teeth show.

Speaker 35 Says she's checking for buck teeth, peg teeth, malocclusion, wolf teeth, and broken or chipped teeth.

Speaker 32 The goal here is for the kids to look for the things a veteran judge would look for if they were evaluating this rabbit.

Speaker 32 Molly runs through the checklist she memorized with her dad: ears, nose, teeth, and then wraps it up with this professional assessment.

Speaker 35 I would like to see more of

Speaker 35 the wool type of fur on his hind legs but overall he is a very

Speaker 35 he is an excellent rabbit

Speaker 32 Molly's learned her 4-H lessons well the judges have no questions she gets 94 points out of 100

Speaker 32 most of the kids I meet are proud of their rabbits They talk about how soft they are, how nice their markings are. Except for Jillian King, who is 11 and who has absolutely had it with her rabbit.

Speaker 9 He's molting and he's really ugly right now. If I could get rid of him.

Speaker 10 Oh, bam.

Speaker 9 That sounds bad, but it's true. He needs more hair.
He doesn't match breed standards. He's just the best rabbit I have for this right now.

Speaker 32 The rabbit in question is named Chacho. He's small and brown and has a bad case of bedhead.
Hair puffed out in all the wrong places, and a look that says he knows he screwed up.

Speaker 32 Oh, he's so cute, though.

Speaker 9 He is cute, but not cute enough to be like that.

Speaker 18 What's his breed again?

Speaker 9 Lionhead.

Speaker 32 Oh, he's a lionhead. I want to see the lionheads.

Speaker 9 Well, there's a better breed standards ones over here.

Speaker 34 He is not quite up to the best breed standards.

Speaker 9 But the better ones are over there.

Speaker 32 Jillian takes me a few rows over and points to two bunnies.

Speaker 32 And holy hell, I am telling you, these bunnies are some good ass-looking bunnies with that kind of calm demeanor that comes with effortless beauty.

Speaker 32 One is brownish-gray with dark brown ears that stick up in a regal way and hair that seems feline. The other one has a classically pretty bunny face, light brown, chubby cheeks, button nose.

Speaker 32 He's sitting up like a dog, or like a bunny, I guess, his eyes locked on the back of Chacho's fuzzy head.

Speaker 34 Wow.

Speaker 9 These two are very up to breed standards. They are gorgeous.
They have a perfect mane and skirt and saddle and everything that you should see.

Speaker 9 He, if you compare,

Speaker 32 Jillian holds Chacho up in front of these hot bunnies so I can see the difference.

Speaker 9 He should have a lot more hair. His hair didn't grow out as well, but he's also molting so he's losing a lot of it right now, but it'll grow back.

Speaker 32 He's going through an awkward phase right now though.

Speaker 20 Poor guy.

Speaker 9 But he's still not as good as these guys.

Speaker 9 These guys would beat him. in a regular show.
They would just easily beat him. They're just better.

Speaker 32 At the rabbit show, show, each rabbit is sized up against its breed standards. And then the judge awards the rabbit handler a ribbon.
Confoundingly, purple is the best, followed by blue.

Speaker 32 A blue ribbon says, your rabbit is up to breed standards, but isn't exceptional enough to get a purple.

Speaker 32 Next is red, which means your rabbit is a delinquent, and then white, which means you are a delinquent.

Speaker 32 Jillian and her older sister, Jenna, are both having a bad hair day.

Speaker 32 Get it?

Speaker 32 Chacho is a mess, and Jenna's best rabbit, Martini, just got disqualified. Jenna's sitting in a camping chair in tears.
Jenna, can I ask you what happened?

Speaker 8 Ah, so I read Harlequin rabbits.

Speaker 34 I was told one of my rabbits is sick, that her nose is running and she's the best coloring I've gotten.

Speaker 33 I don't know why she's sick.

Speaker 33 I'm just super disappointed right now.

Speaker 32 Disappointed and also worried. She loves this snotty rabbit.

Speaker 32 We walk over to Martini, who's lying across the back of her cage.

Speaker 13 That's Martini.

Speaker 32 She's beautiful.

Speaker 32 She has black and white bands across her body and a perfect face split, which is to say, half her muzzle is white and half is black. A very desirable trait in a harlequin rabbit.

Speaker 32 To my untrained eye, she seems pissed. Jenna says Martini and her sister, Tequila, don't really like people.

Speaker 32 She bred them herself, choosing to pair a rabbit named Whiskey with good coloring to a lady rabbit named Fawn, who has a great face split. Out of that blessed union, Martini was born.

Speaker 7 It was the week that things got really cold in January, like negative 40. Half of her litter did not make it.
It really sucked, but her mom got two of them through, which is good.

Speaker 24 So she's like a little miracle rabbit.

Speaker 32 Was that really sad?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It was my first litter, too, so, you know, that was a little bit rough. But you can't let it hold you back.

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 24 you only get better the farther along you go. Can't really quit in the beginning.

Speaker 32 Well, I guess you could if you wanted, but.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but.

Speaker 32 Jenna and I have a difference of opinion here. I'm totally for quitting.

Speaker 32 Especially if the activity involves frozen bunnies.

Speaker 32 As we're admiring Martini, Jenna's mother, TJ, walks up with news.

Speaker 36 She doesn't.

Speaker 25 She's what? She's allergic to the sawdust. I just talked to that guy who said, hey, it's an allergy.

Speaker 32 They did not. Martini is not sick.

Speaker 32 She does not have snuffles, which is rabbit sniffles.

Speaker 32 She's just allergic to the sawdust they put in all the rabbit cages at the fair.

Speaker 32 Jenna doesn't use sawdust at home, so she had no way of knowing this.

Speaker 32 She's crying again.

Speaker 13 They have them.

Speaker 36 It's so good, you know.

Speaker 25 Right, I said we're learning things the hard way this year, and that sucks.

Speaker 32 I suspect the lesson TJ is referring to is don't put sawdust in a rabbit cage.

Speaker 32 But I could see another lesson appearing on the horizon,

Speaker 32 one about the inevitability of disappointment, how disappointment leads to growth, how you don't need some technocrat from the bunny industrial complex to hand you a ribbon to know in your heart that you've got an outstanding rabbit.

Speaker 19 How's that make you feel better? Yeah, way better.

Speaker 36 I really thought something might have happened and I didn't see it.

Speaker 34 Nancy invited us to the show in Boone in October because she's a phenomenal rabbit.

Speaker 19 Yay, come here.

Speaker 7 Go here.

Speaker 32 They hug it out.

Speaker 7 I'm glad now that we know it's just an allergy.

Speaker 7 That makes me feel like, again, 20 times better.

Speaker 25 Did you just hear what they said over the loudspeaker? No. For harlequins, the best rabbit here today had to be disqualified.

Speaker 32 Understanding washes over Jenna's face. More tears.

Speaker 19 Don't cry. I'm going to cry for you.
You know what that means?

Speaker 36 I don't want to make Joe Martini again when she's not hay-shaped sick?

Speaker 24 Yes, and that your breeding program is exactly on track where you want it to be.

Speaker 25 That is the moment you take away from this, okay?

Speaker 24 That you did something phenomenal genetically. It's not about the show, okay?

Speaker 19 I'm so proud.

Speaker 19 You be proud of that.

Speaker 23 Okay.

Speaker 10 I know, me too. I don't have any.

Speaker 19 Don't cry.

Speaker 36 That's great.

Speaker 36 I'm excited to breed her now.

Speaker 32 Jenna plans to match Martini with Mo, the rabbit in the cage next door, who's a few months younger than Martini and seems like a doofus, but but I'm no expert.

Speaker 32 And what about poor Chacho, Jillian's discombobulated rabbit? He ends up getting a red ribbon, which is second to worst. Or, if you ask Chacho, third best.
Jillian's surprised.

Speaker 9 It was better than I was expecting. Yeah.

Speaker 32 Are you less mad at him, though?

Speaker 9 No, not really. I'm still getting rid of him, so

Speaker 9 he's cute, but he's not what I'm looking forward to bring into my breeding program.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 32 the lesson Chacho takes home from the state fair is: show business isn't for everyone, but he has a happy retirement to look forward to.

Speaker 32 Jillian plans to sell him to a good home where he'll be someone's pet, or maybe better for Chacho, the young buck in someone else's, probably unsuccessful, breeding program.

Speaker 4 Danny Chavez is a producer on our show.

Speaker 4 One quick program note before we go any further. Some of you may have noticed a word usage that you're getting ready to email us about.

Speaker 4 I just want to say right now, yes, we know that a hare is not the same thing as a rabbit. But, can I say, puns breed around this office like

Speaker 4 punnies.

Speaker 4 Tech three,

Speaker 4 limp biscuit.

Speaker 4 So every IO1 that I talked to outside the fair this year, when I mentioned that I was going to the fair, what we would end up talking about was food and what to eat.

Speaker 4 Food is a big thing at so many state fairs. News coverage of Iowa's fair always includes the latest stuff, like this year's bacon, cheeseburger, egg roll.

Speaker 4 There are nearly 200 food stands at the fair, and they rarely become available for people who want to try to create the next hit themselves.

Speaker 4 Those spots are highly coveted because there's so much money to be made. Fairs management says that some vendors earn their entire annual income for the year at those 11 days at the fair.

Speaker 4 Chris Bender followed one family that tried to jump into the game this year.

Speaker 3 Of the handful of new food stands at the fair this year, it was obvious which one would be the most interesting to watch.

Speaker 3 It's run by a couple, Jamie and Jennifer Adkins, and as best as I can tell, they're different from the other food stand managers at the fair in one important way.

Speaker 3 So you guys have not run a restaurant before?

Speaker 32 That's correct.

Speaker 3 And you guys haven't run your own stand at another state fair before?

Speaker 20 Correct. This is our first big gig.

Speaker 3 All the other new food stands in Iowa this year are owned and run by people in the restaurant business, or they've done other big fairs. So how did Jamie and Jennifer end up doing this?

Speaker 3 Well, for a long time, Jennifer had dreamt of opening her own coffee shop. Then her husband saw this opportunity.

Speaker 3 Not to launch a coffee shop exactly, but to launch an 11-day-long state fair version of it. He heard about a food stand that was withdrawing from the state fair.

Speaker 3 They could save money by buying its used trailer and equipment. Jennifer could sell coffee drinks and they'd do some food on the side.

Speaker 3 Biscuit sandwiches, they decided, because there aren't many vendors selling breakfast at the fair. And so they jumped in and prepared to launch Biscuit Bar.

Speaker 3 But when I talked to them in July, before the fair opened, they each had very different expectations for how much money they'd make.

Speaker 18 I tend to be more frugal

Speaker 37 and conservative about finances.

Speaker 37 So I'm really just hoping

Speaker 37 be able to help pay for some of the expenses that we've had. That's really what I'm hoping for.

Speaker 3 Jennifer just wants to break even, cover all their costs. But she told me she didn't think they'd do that.
The costs were too big. They had spent $300,000 for the trailer and all the equipment.

Speaker 3 And that's before you get to salaries and food costs. Plus, the state fair takes 19.5% of every dollar every food vendor brings in.

Speaker 3 Jamie, her husband, owns a successful trucking business. And when I reached him by phone, he was confident they'd make everything back this first year.

Speaker 38 It'll work. I guarantee that it'll work.

Speaker 38 No doubt about it. It'll work.
It's just how much the profit is, you know.

Speaker 38 My personal thought for this year was I'd like to do about gross sales of 300, 350.

Speaker 38 on the minimum side. It's kind of like going to casino.

Speaker 38 You go there to win, you just hope you win more than you lose, you know?

Speaker 3 This kind of confidence, of course, is exactly what you'd need if you're an amateur and you decided you're going to get into any part of the restaurant business, a notoriously difficult business to make money in.

Speaker 3 But Jamie has a cousin, Joni, who runs two popular, very successful food stands at the fair. Jamie's helped her out a little in the past.

Speaker 3 And seeing his cousin's operation made the idea of raking in lots of cash seem way more possible. At least for him.
Again, here's his wife, Jennifer.

Speaker 37 Probably for him, you know, because it really looks effortless for her. She's just so good.

Speaker 37 And there's no way I'd ever be able to get up to her level.

Speaker 37 And I think for him, she really is inspiring,

Speaker 8 for sure.

Speaker 3 Could that be almost a tricky thing because she makes it look deceptively simple?

Speaker 37 Possibly, yes.

Speaker 3 6.30 a.m., August 8th, the first day of the fair. And this, employees scraping cooked food out of pots into storage containers, is the sound of a food stand about to debut itself to Iowa.

Speaker 3 The gates of the fair don't open until 8 a.m., so let me give you a sense of the place. Right now I'm in the open-air kitchen that's behind Biscuit Bar.

Speaker 3 This is where all the raw materials, meats and eggs and biscuits are cooked, and then get passed into the trailer where they're assembled into sandwiches. Everyone's calm.
They're ready.

Speaker 3 Can I ask what you guys are doing at this point?

Speaker 4 Playing in tubs.

Speaker 27 Cleaning tubs.

Speaker 27 We got our stuff made.

Speaker 3 The trailer Jamie and Jennifer paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for is gleaming with a green and pink facade emblazoned with real pictures of biscuit sandwiches, but also cartoons of friendly anthropomorphized biscuit sandwiches.

Speaker 3 The word espresso appears in four places. And then at the top, outlined with dots of neon lights in big letters, biscuit bar.
There are three registers out front, each with a teenager behind it.

Speaker 3 Lily is the most chipper by far. She's ready to sell.

Speaker 15 We're really excited to be here. We've got a couple great new items.

Speaker 34 We have the piggy and a donut, which won an award, especially for our piggy.

Speaker 15 Yes, our piggy secret sauce. It's kind of got a kick to it.
It's got some chipotle in it. So if you're feeling something a little bit spicier, definitely that's the way to go.

Speaker 15 We also have a bubbly latte, which is kind of like a hybrid between your like...

Speaker 3 It's about 7.45 a.m. Some of the people who are allowed in early, fair staff, people here to show livestock, they start lining up at Biscuit Bar, eager for breakfast and coffee.

Speaker 3 I find Jamie inside the trailer. He's got a buzzed head, goatee, gruff voice, but soft eyes.
He's assembling coffee orders alongside one of his new employees.

Speaker 27 What do you need?

Speaker 2 Vanilla and Edwin toffee.

Speaker 27 So it's a small? Yeah, one day.

Speaker 3 They're both wearing these hot pink biscuit bar t-shirts. Everyone here is.

Speaker 3 And in this moment, I'm struck by how something as simple as matching t-shirts can create a unifying sense of shared fortune, of teamwork. It's almost beautiful to behold.

Speaker 3 Wait, actually, there's some kind of issue with the espresso drink.

Speaker 39 See, it looks weak to me.

Speaker 11 That's what she was saying, too.

Speaker 2 What is going on here?

Speaker 3 This ice drink looks weird. It tastes weird.
Jamie starts inspecting the backside of the large espresso machine.

Speaker 18 See, I've always been intimidated by this thing.

Speaker 2 Somebody shut the switch off.

Speaker 18 That's why

Speaker 13 it wasn't brewing because it's not hot.

Speaker 2 This is never supposed to get shut off and somebody had shut it off.

Speaker 2 It's going to probably take like five or six minutes.

Speaker 39 Let's just see.

Speaker 3 When Jamie says it'll take five or six minutes for the water to reheat, he actually has no idea how long it'll take.

Speaker 3 A couple espresso drink orders are already waiting and more are coming in. Five minutes pass.
The water still isn't hot. Jamie shows Jennifer.

Speaker 2 The problem is that it's not hot, Jennifer. It's going to take like five more minutes probably.

Speaker 23 So we need a vanilla ice despite.

Speaker 2 And there's fresh grounds in there ready to go, but the water isn't hot enough yet, so.

Speaker 2 Somebody shut the switch off on the bottom. I don't know what they was doing, but.

Speaker 3 Jamie leaves Jennifer to figure out the coffee. Meanwhile, the employees assembling the sandwiches inside the trailer are shouting out the window to the kitchen.
They need supplies.

Speaker 3 Brisket for the brisket sandwich won't be ready for 20 more minutes and there are other shortages.

Speaker 3 We got sausage gravy!

Speaker 23 Sausage gravy!

Speaker 2 Do we have more gravy made? Nope. Okay, well then we need to be making gravy.

Speaker 8 Wow.

Speaker 3 Or a little later.

Speaker 2 What's she want? Sausage patty. Sausage patty.

Speaker 27 Okay, we better put some more on.

Speaker 2 Do you know where they're at?

Speaker 3 Jamie starts rummaging through the fridge looking for more individually wrapped sausage patties. He started the day with just 80, and now they're almost out.

Speaker 3 Jamie does find a huge bag of raw sausage and gets people to start molding that into patties. His brother Jeff starts grilling them.
Jamie feels like these handmade patties are a workable solution.

Speaker 3 Jeff, who is like a shorter version of Jamie with a dash of Joe Pesci mixed in, does not.

Speaker 2 We can make them right here.

Speaker 28 Yeah, them don't cook like the other ones do. They're a pain in the fucking dick.

Speaker 3 In case you didn't catch that, Jeff said the handmade patties are a pain in the fucking dick to cook.

Speaker 28 Because then you gotta check every one of them because they're not the same thickness, not the same

Speaker 12 shape.

Speaker 2 It'll be alright.

Speaker 3 Jamie does have a secret card he can play in this situation. He phones up Joni, his cousin with the successful food stands, to see if she has extra patties.

Speaker 2 Hello.

Speaker 2 I think I'm gonna run out of

Speaker 2 pork patties before I can get time to go to the the kitchen and get what Josh dropped me.

Speaker 2 We are busy.

Speaker 2 We had a few people.

Speaker 2 Fucking Albert.

Speaker 3 Albert is the guy who was supposed to deliver the milk. Give me that milk.
Another problem.

Speaker 2 You must not have brought me whole milk. I'm going to fucking kill him.

Speaker 27 Told him

Speaker 2 12 gallon of whole milk, and he brought me all skim.

Speaker 3 This is a problem. You can't make gravy with skin milk.
Motherfucker.

Speaker 2 Okay, bud.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, out in front of the trailer, there's a semicircle of customers waiting for their orders. They all seem pretty calm, including Erica and Chris, two women who are wearing athleisure wear.

Speaker 3 We're waiting. Has it been a bit of a wait?

Speaker 36 Just a little bit, but that's okay. They're figuring things out.

Speaker 3 Can I ask how long you've been waiting?

Speaker 37 Right now we're at eight minutes.

Speaker 3 Back inside the big green and pink trailer.

Speaker 31 Hey, we need another like three piggies in a hot chick.

Speaker 3 It's very tight in the trailer, and to assemble sandwiches, people are constantly squeezing past each other because the sausage and biscuits and eggs are on one end, and the sauces and dressings and cheese are on the other.

Speaker 3 Then they drop the finished sandwiches wrapped in foil near the front window. But the problem is, there's nothing written on the foil, they all look alike.

Speaker 3 Which is why one of the cashiers sticks his head in and asks me, What's this?

Speaker 11 Did you hear what this was?

Speaker 13 Yeah, that was nice. It's probably a regular.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that was an irregular.

Speaker 3 Over and over, the staff have to gently unwrap the corner of a sandwich to check what it is. Of course, there's a simpler solution to this, a way to label the sandwiches.

Speaker 23 But.

Speaker 23 Do you have a marker, Brooke?

Speaker 3 Jennifer, who's in charge of the trailer, cannot find the one permanent marker that they had. Oh, and also, some of the orders aren't showing up on the overhead computer screens inside the trailer.

Speaker 3 So everyone's resorted to just yelling out orders at each other.

Speaker 27 I need a regular?

Speaker 13 We need a hot mess. We need a small ice resolution.

Speaker 34 We get to confirm on that hot mess.

Speaker 23 Yes, he's clearing the way.

Speaker 3 Things feel so out of control that just 45 minutes after the ferris gates have opened, Jamie calls for reinforcements. His 12-year-old daughter and his 19-year-old stepson, Alex.

Speaker 2 Hello, where are you at?

Speaker 2 Okay, you need to get to work.

Speaker 2 I know you're not supposed to start until 10, but we are slam busy. Just get down here as quick as you can.

Speaker 2 There's people lined up flirting the street and your mom probably needs needs you on the inside.

Speaker 3 Back out front, I tracked down the customers, Erica and Chris, again. They'd just gotten their food.

Speaker 34 It's tasty.

Speaker 24 It's good, but not worth 35-minute wait.

Speaker 27 35 minutes?

Speaker 8 Yes. And what do you think? It's very good.

Speaker 25 Yep. Okay.
I wouldn't wait again.

Speaker 3 The whole thing's kind of painful to watch. People are requesting refunds.
It's obvious this is not how this is supposed to go.

Speaker 3 I was curious how a food stand at the fair is supposed to work, and I didn't have to go far. A couple stands down is an incredibly successful food vendor that's been around for years.

Speaker 30 Brad and Harry's cheese curds have been at the Iowa State Fair since somewhere in the mid-early 90s.

Speaker 3 Matt Reebar runs three cheese curd stands and one poutine stand here at the Iowa Fair. And the way they operate has been refined over decades.

Speaker 3 And the biggest difference I noticed from Jamie and Jennifer's biscuit bar,

Speaker 3 simplicity,

Speaker 3 all emanating from this fact.

Speaker 30 We have one item. We have one item, it costs one amount.
We know they're in line for cheese skirts, right? We know what the change is.

Speaker 30 We can see in their wallet and know what bill they're going to grab, and we can already have the change ready by the time that transaction happens.

Speaker 3 Biscuit bar, by contrast, has 11 food items and 16 beverage choices, many with a bunch of different customizations.

Speaker 30 It's volume. That's what we're after, is the volume.

Speaker 34 Quality, but volume.

Speaker 3 Inside his trailer, it's tightly packed with employees in a smaller space than Biscuit Bar.

Speaker 3 But somehow, it's more orderly.

Speaker 30 But as far as workstations and like positions in here, that's another thing. Everybody in there has one job

Speaker 30 and they are within one foot of what they need to do. They don't have to take two steps to do anything in there.

Speaker 30 We've got enough people where if you needed to take two steps, we're going to put another person in there to do that for you. Just to be efficient as much as possible.

Speaker 3 The trailer was custom-built, so every step of making the food is laid out in perfectly sequential cheese curd assembly stations.

Speaker 3 Over at the biscuit bar, employees make complicated coffee drinks and smoothies and pour fountain drinks.

Speaker 3 At Matt's cheese curd stands, his employees don't make drinks at all. Matt sees that as inefficient.

Speaker 2 Instead, we've got a self-serve pop.

Speaker 30 Pop takes a lot of time, so if we can hand them a cup, they can go take their time, fill their ice as much as they want or as little as they want.

Speaker 3 One last note about the simplicity of Matt's cheese curd stands. Paper towels.
People need them constantly in a kitchen.

Speaker 3 And Matt has positioned a roll that hangs horizontally from a bungee cord above the workers. They can grab and tear them off effortlessly without taking up any space.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, back at Biscuit Bar.

Speaker 2 This stupid fucking thing.

Speaker 3 Jamie had one of those large black mechanized paper towel dispensers that you find in public restrooms. The kind you have to wave your hands under.

Speaker 3 This morning it was spitting out only a couple inches of paper towel at a time.

Speaker 3 The whole first morning it seemed like Biscuit Bar couldn't catch any luck.

Speaker 3 Then in the early afternoon,

Speaker 3 it finally feels like Biscuit Bar writes the ship.

Speaker 13 A piggy?

Speaker 27 Okay, I'll get him a piggy.

Speaker 3 Everybody's talking at a more normal volume. The wait times are way shorter.
And the kitchen is feeding the sandwich makers what they need when they need it.

Speaker 27 There's you some more brisket.

Speaker 3 The lines are shorter now, not exactly 10 or 12 people deep like during the breakfast rush. But there's still a steady flow of customers.
People really like Biscuit Bar. I feel hopeful for them.

Speaker 3 For the first time, I think maybe they could break even.

Speaker 3 By the time I catch up with Jennifer again, it's closing time, 10 p.m. She's at the cash registers printing out the daily totals.

Speaker 3 Is this like when you print out the totals from the registers? Is that the first time you're seeing the numbers?

Speaker 37 Um, yeah.

Speaker 3 Jennifer looks over the receipts, then tucks them away. Her face is hard to read.
Maybe a little solemn. Can you tell me, looking at the receipts from the first day,

Speaker 3 do you have a sense of like, oh, at this rate, if we do this for 10 days, we could break even or get close to my goal?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 37 We just have so much money in this stand.

Speaker 37 And...

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 3 Even with this big first day, it feels like... Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Just then, Jamie wanders over.

Speaker 15 he was asking if we were at this rate if we would break even

Speaker 2 no we got we got a lot invested in the stay-and and

Speaker 1 my guess it's two years three years

Speaker 3 ten days pass the fair ends and i check back in with jamie and jennifer They both worked from 5 in the morning till 11 at night on their feet for 11 consecutive days without a break.

Speaker 2 It was grueling.

Speaker 3 And the money. It was way less than they'd hoped for.
Less than half of what Jamie had predicted.

Speaker 3 After the food costs and operating expenses, and after the fair took its nearly 20% cut, they were left with about $70,000 profit. $70,000.
Good money.

Speaker 3 But all of it would go towards paying back their original investment. which was, remember, $300,000.

Speaker 3 At that rate, Jamie and Jennifer will be working for free for four years before they pay off their debts. And after four years, they'd take home $70,000 every state fair before taxes.

Speaker 3 A solid chunk of money for sure. Lots of families would take that deal.

Speaker 3 But this was still so much less than they talked about earning. Remember, Jamie's estimate would have had them pocketing two or three times that amount.

Speaker 3 So I just wondered, does that math, like, how does that sit with you? Does that feel worth it to you?

Speaker 40 I think so. I mean, like, I'm not really bothered by it, you know, now after the fact.

Speaker 39 I think it's worth it. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it.

Speaker 3 Jamie told me he was completely unfazed when he saw the numbers come in. You didn't feel anything about, well, I guess we're going to be a little short of kind of half of what I wanted.

Speaker 39 No.

Speaker 39 No.

Speaker 3 I think a lot of people would have a hard time adjusting to that reality. Nonetheless.

Speaker 8 I wouldn't. Wait, really?

Speaker 3 I mean, you're a really blunt guy, Jamie, but on this one thing, I got to say, I don't know if I believe you.

Speaker 41 Yeah, no, you can believe me. I deal with it all the time.

Speaker 41 My trucking business, a couple years ago, done

Speaker 41 right out $12 million in sales, gross sales, and we won't even be

Speaker 41 $8 million probably this year. I've been in business long enough that I know that just because you made that much money yesterday don't mean you're going to make it today, you know.

Speaker 3 I didn't appreciate at first just how much Jamie sees opening a business at the fair as being like a trip to the casino.

Speaker 3 When he predicted that they'd make $300,000 to $350,000 their first summer, that wasn't because he'd done some careful calculations, counting the number of biscuits you could sell each day.

Speaker 3 It was just a wish. He was going to put his money down on the table, roll the dice, and hope for the best.

Speaker 3 And even though it'll take years before they pay off Biscuit Bar's debts, Jamie is already encouraging Jennifer to open up her coffee shop this upcoming spring.

Speaker 3 Jennifer isn't so sure if the finances will work. Jamie, though, he feels lucky.

Speaker 4 Chris Bendreau, he's one of the producers of today's episode. We first aired this story a year ago.
This year, the biscuit bar lives on. on.

Speaker 4 Jennifer and Jamie tweak some things on the menu in hopes of increasing efficiency. They return to the fair this week.

Speaker 4 Act four,

Speaker 4 last stand.

Speaker 4 Saturday night, the part of the park with rides for little kids closes down at 10 p.m.

Speaker 4 I stopped by there a little before that,

Speaker 5 wondering if I can talk to Jeremy, the agent of the Water Gun Game.

Speaker 11 Come up, look, I got a family special here for you guys. Closing special guys, I want to get four people to play whoever wins.
It gets a big choice, guys.

Speaker 4 That hoarse, exhausted signing person is Barry, who's doing stock, handling prizes for Jeremy earlier in the day.

Speaker 4 Now Jeremy's the one handling prizes and Barry's on the mic.

Speaker 11 Wait here, you ready? Have a seat.

Speaker 21 That's one.

Speaker 22 I need at least two to start.

Speaker 4 There are a few straggler families left, and they are keeping themselves as far as they can from Barry, holding a distance of maybe 35, 40 feet.

Speaker 4 They look beat, and they are not interested in Barry's shenanigans on the mic. Finally, one woman sits down at the game.

Speaker 28 I got one in the door and at least one more person to start.

Speaker 31 I see you peeking out there. You can't win it by looking at a girl.

Speaker 11 Come on, give it a shot. Somebody's done.

Speaker 4 A second woman pulls up in a motorized wheelchair. Barry pleads with people to sit.

Speaker 4 When I ask him what this is about,

Speaker 11 we're like $100 short from our goal tonight.

Speaker 4 Jeremy tells me that they had a goal to bring in $10,000 that day for the game.

Speaker 4 Now, I want to be clear, this was not management that set this goal.

Speaker 4 Jeremy did, he said.

Speaker 4 That's the number he wanted to hit.

Speaker 4 He and Barry each get a percentage of that ten thousand dollars they decided on how much they wanted to make for the day and then they were going to use everything they had to make that number

Speaker 4 begging people to sit down

Speaker 28 i got two at the door i'm looking for two more

Speaker 4 what i need more than two barry ends up running a modified two-person version of the game for a smaller prize and keeps going with more rounds

Speaker 4 ten o'clock comes rides around us starts shutting down ferris wheel lights go off that feels weird this gigantic multicolored, bright thing suddenly pitch dark.

Speaker 4 Very tired, clumps of people wander past it towards parking lots.

Speaker 4 But the water gun race is an island of light and noise.

Speaker 11 Come on, come on. Last race.
Last race of the night. Have a seat, guys.
Come on up. One more time.
We're going to give another big one away, guys. Last race of the night.
Last race of the night, guys.

Speaker 11 Come on up. Put us out.

Speaker 23 One more person.

Speaker 4 They finally run their last race. Four minutes after 10 o'clock.

Speaker 4 Four minutes after this part of the park officially closed.

Speaker 31 Go, go, go, go, go. Who's gonna be stop watch antsy number

Speaker 11 winner winner winner 22 any prize in these size all right guys have a great rest of your night thank you all appreciate you

Speaker 4 they're done

Speaker 5 sound systems off they made their goal they told me

Speaker 4 jeremy said when 10 o'clock hit of course they had to keep going we had a goal We needed five more dollars.

Speaker 26 All right, we got a flash. Yeah,

Speaker 11 we gotta do do stuff.

Speaker 4 Gotta flash means they're not done for the night. They have to head over to where the prizes are stored,

Speaker 4 get some prizes, come back to the game, and put them in place for tomorrow. They said they started to work around 9 that morning.
It was 10 at night. They had another hour's work to go.

Speaker 4 We kept going, Jeremy said, because we like money.

Speaker 4 The merry

Speaker 4 gorge

Speaker 13 is beginning to slow down.

Speaker 14 Have I stayed too long

Speaker 14 at the fair?

Speaker 14 The

Speaker 14 music

Speaker 14 has stopped

Speaker 8 and the children must go now.

Speaker 14 Have I stayed too long at the fair?

Speaker 4 Our programme was produced today by Chris Benderev and Ike Srees Condorajo.

Speaker 4 The people who put together today's show include Bim Ada Woonmi, Sean Cole, Michael Kamate, Aviva Dekornfeld, Hanny Hawasle, Henry Larson, Seth Lynn, Miki Meek, Catherine Raymondo, Stro Nelson, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa Schipp, Marisa Robertson Texter, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu.

Speaker 4 Our managing editor, Sarah Abduraman, our senior editors, David Kastenbaum, our executive editor, is Emmanuel Berry. Help on today's rerun from Suzanne Gabber and Angela Dravasi.

Speaker 4 Special thanks today to Yolanda Steven, Clinton Wallace, Jodi Weeks, Andy and Scott Schaefer, Jenny Wunderlich, Mindy Williamson, Tyrus Thompson, Chris Olson, Jeff Jones, Sam Struzes, Melissa and Megan Schwarzen-Ruber, Anapaf Slopez, and John Wiederhorn.

Speaker 4 Our website, thisamericanlife.org, you can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

Speaker 4 Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torre Malatea.

Speaker 4 Just this week, he turned down Timothy Chalamet's offer to help him and his wife conceive a child.

Speaker 9 He's cute, but he's not what I'm looking forward to bringing into my breeding program. So

Speaker 8 on our glass.

Speaker 4 Back next week with more stories of this American life.

Speaker 12 Stay too long

Speaker 12 at

Speaker 12 the

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