Everything is Becoming an Advertisement: Local Events Are No Longer Fun, Instead They Are like Walking Through the Mall

Here in North East, Pennsylvania, a little town in northwestern Pennsylvania, we celebrate cherries every summer.  This past weekend was our Cherry Festival, sponsored by our local Volunteer Fire Departments.  I remember up until about 3 years ago that everyone used to love the Dunking Booth with Hobo the Clown and some of our local citizens, the Cherry Pies that sold for $5.00 each, lots of carnival rides like the Round Up, the Flying Bobs, and the Ferris Wheel, each one took 3 tickets, which at the time were no more than 50 cents each, unless you bought the advanced tickets which substituted for 3 regular priced tickets and were cheaper, the Tuesday and Saturday Ride-A-Rama was $5.00...then to end the 5 day event, the parade.  A two-hour parade, full of floats, music, children, animals, and clowns.  Everyone was running along the side of the road, hoping to be sprayed by fire trucks, children were running hoping to catch candy thrown from the floats.  That was then, this is now.  

This past weekend, I took my own children to the Cherry Festival.  The Ride-A-Rama was $10 per child!  That was thirty dollars for my three children to ride about 5 rides!  They only had 8 rides, 5 of which my children were old enough to ride.  In order to grab a duck out of the duckpond, they wanted us to pay $3 per duck!  Wasn't it just a couple of years ago that it cost only a dollar?  Instead of seeing the dunking booth, the pie-eating contest, and the firetrucks at the parade, the whole field was packed with radio stations, games that cost $5 to win a stuffed animal (which by the way would fall apart as soon as a child slept with it), and goldfish that came home and would be buried the next day due to the food coloring and balls that got tossed in the water with them.  And those yummy Cherry Pies?  EIGHT DOLLARS!!  I don't think I have ever spent $8 on a small cherry pie in my life!