I can’t help but compare this “Great American State Fair” with the Calgary Stampede, which is taking place right now.
10 days - 1.4 million people expected to attend.
Huge midway - 70 rides, not just one stupid ferris wheel
Hundred of food vendors, with some really interesting and innovative choices
Exhibits, booths, animals
Largest outdoor rodeo over 10 days, with over 2 million in prize money
Evening show every night, with entertainment, chuckwagon races and fireworks
Over 150 artists across 10 venues, including Alanis Morissette, A$AP Rocky, Deadmau5, The Beaches, Alessia Cara, and Mother Mother.
And a whole lot more.
They do this every single year since 1923, so they know what they’re doing.
St. Louis had the same problem with its annual July 4 celebration at the Arch (which is run by the National Park Service). The Service used some formula to calculate how long people stayed and averaged it over the length of event, using a grid pattern to count people at given times. At some point in the mid-1990’s the Service got tired of people questioning the numbers and announced it was getting out of the crowd-estimation business.
Without something like limited entrances and turnstiles, it’s damn near impossible to really get a good handle on crowd size, even with overhead photography.
Good comparison. I’ve been to the Stampede many times. Plenty of fun on the midway with the rides and games, excitement at the rodeo, interesting exhibits, food that is guaranteed to clog your arteries, a casino, beer gardens with music, and lots of other fun things to see and do.
The Great American State Fair looks awfully boring in comparison.
ISTR a dispute between rival South American politicians awhile back. They each had rallies in the same large public square, a week or two apart, and each boasted that he drew the bigger crowd. A newspaper closely analyzed aerial photos of each rally and determined that both politicians had overestimated their crowd sizes.
Heck, The Great American State Fair looks boring compelled to The Topsfield Fair held in Topsfield, a town of 6.500 people about 25 miles north of Boston.
(They’ve been holding them almost every year since 1818, so they know what they’re doing. And they’ve got a big Midway and lots of performers, and it always looks a lot busier than those photos. TGASF didn’t even have one Giant Pumpkin.)
There was a one-panel newspaper cartoon by Dick Guindon (sort of a proto-Far Side). One had a middle-aged man telling his wife something along the lines of “We’d get along better if you always did things my way”.
I once represented my company at a college job fair that was about as well attended. To be fair, there was a hurricane (Ike, I think) approaching the city, which may have affected turnout. Still picked up a fair few resumes, though
The more I think about the article, the more it pisses me off.
I saw a Legal Eagle video the story of how Trump stole the show (as it were), including funding and deceiving donors. Grrrr.
But back to this:
What the fuck is so special about Chick Fil-A? I took my kids there and it just seems like another fast food place.
I think a lot of Americans overestimate the awe of large stores.
I’ve directly heard from hundreds of Asians about their trips to the States over the years and no one talks about their trips to Walmarts. Japan and Taiwan have had Costcos for decades now so that isn’t anything special.
I think most of the awe (good word) about large stores is manufactured by the store owners and is lapped up by Middle America (the social / economic class, not the geographical area) who then dutifully traipse over to see the latest Bass Pro or whatever.
Like you, I doubt most foreign tourists are that interested in the USA Big Box phenomenon. At least not after a first glance into one.
If we rewind to the e.g. 1960s, there were no big box stores. There were department stores, and Sears, and … that’s about it. Which in smaller cites and towns were small affairs. Small disconnected towns were also a LOT more common in 1965 than they are in 2025. So many have either grown together into giant metroblobs, or all but died if they’re too far out in ruralia.
Then came the era of big-boxing starting in the late 1970s. Home Depots were incredible compared to the Mom & Pop hardware stores that went before. So much merch under one roof!!! Then more flavors of big box store were invented: the so called “category killers”. Best Buy & Circuit City swept away nearly all the independent electronics retailers. etc.
Here in 2026 the era of big-boxing ever more genres of goods is just about over. Amazon started strangling new category killers in the cradle 15-20 years ago, then COVID whacked a lot of the dazed struggling survivors. e.g. Circuit City is dead and gone and Best Buy is on its last legs.
But the cultural habit of going wild (on cue from management) when a new big box or overgrown fancy convenience market or whatever first comes to your own town. Buzz generates sales, and the sheeple lurve to pass along local buzz about nearly anything. All that differs is the scale that excites the local populace. A shiny new Wawa might excite the residents of e.g. Bumfuque Montana, but it takes something more extravagant to wow the many more residents of e.g. Chicago.
So we might be seeing the end of the Big Box as a locals’ attraction. Might.
I was recently vacationing in Italy. GF & I were walking down a smart shopping street lined with cute little eateries and designer boutiques and such. Plus a few tourist souvenir schlock outlets. Most of the eateries and about half the non-schlock stores were unfamiliar to me. The rest could be had at the mall in my 'burb.
Certainly some of the boutique products were Italian designers, and so the (expensive) shoe is on the other foot so to speak. It is they who’ve colonized my hometown mall, not vice versa. Same for French products who’ve colonized both Italy and the USA. But plenty of the branded stores I saw were US-founded and US-based, regardless of where their merchandise is manufactured (read “China”).
Global commerce is real neat in many ways. But it does have the effect of drowning out a lot of what had been local color.
Actually, what would probably shock a foreign visitor to my California town of 50,000 is that we don’t have a KFC. That’s unheard of in most of the world.
