Saturday, August 22nd

It’s a hell of a thing going from working in management for a government department to working as a Carney at the CNE. The first day is always a matter of hurry up and wait, so at least that familiar rhythm carries over. 

The Craft Beer Fest and Food Truck Frenzy is set up at the east end of the grounds near the Prince’s Gate and it doesn’t start until after the Warriors’ Day Parade, which is now in its 125th consecutive year. Some years I’ve shown up early and watched the parade. As we get farther from WW2 and Korea, the number of remaining veterans dwindles. The size of the Canadian forces in Afghanistan and in UN Peacekeeping roles is proportionally much smaller in terms of the society.

Between the parade and the beginning of the festival (which differs a little year over year depending on setup time), it’s the running of the food trucks. Will Philthy Philly’s truck actually drive this year or will it be towed in again for the fourth time running? It’s crucial to get a sense of what food is available early because positioning is key. One year I ended up next to the Stinky Tofu, and while that can be enjoyable as a sometime thing, you probably don’t want to sit downwind of that fryolator in August.

The event has changed a lot over the years. When I signed on to work there it was initially just to get me some hours helping work the refrigerator truck. Around 2017, after the second Ontario Craft Beer Guide, I had run out of work to do in Craft Beer that wasn’t going to be compromising whatever journalistic ethics remained to me. If I’d worked for a brewery, it would have come awfully close to endorsement and I had made the mistake of thinking other people probably cared about that. In the long term, I think that sense of integrity has probably worked in my favour. I ended up working doing historic walking tours and teaching at George Brown. 

When I signed on, Griffin was still figuring out the event having transitioned from the Session Festival, which was a much more compact three day timeline. We had plastic tokens left over from that situation and a predominantly cash economy with old school Casio registers. One year the token station was an exposed folding table on a hill. One year it was a folding table in a tent. One year, I think we were positioned in a gazebo. It all blends together. 

Last year, the booth I occupied in order to sell tokens had some issues. The roof was probably structurally unsound and when it rained, we employed buckets to catch the water that was dripping from the fluorescent light fixture. This year, as a small mercy, the roof is solid and the threat of electrocution is smaller.

For a couple of years we used old school CNE tokens as a replacement for the plastic ones. They were about the same size as loonies, so you’d inevitably make five or six bucks while setting up in the morning, although your hands would smell like brass until October. This year for the first time it’s a digital system. We have QR codes. It becomes clear as we occupy the booths that this is going to take a couple of days to integrate.

I’m leery of digital systems at beer festivals. One of the festivals that makes the circuit tried RFID wristbands and while this putatively allows you to check the balance, you need specialized equipment to do it. A stand with a reader or a trip to the booth or vendors trained enough to look that up with their equipment without charging you the balance. I think it permits too much variability, and variability becomes a quagmire of unforeseen problems. 

The opening of the gates to the marks is always fun. People line up six or seven deep at the gates, Romero style, and security has been telling them we’ll open at 6:00 and now it’s 6:10 and people need the viral Banh Mi Tacos or Sweetcorn Wasabi Lemonade or Footlong Butter Chicken Taquito and there they are like some phalanx of slavering ecstatics in search of cholesterol and joy. The gates open, we get four customers and twenty seven minutes later the heavens open and pelt down rain. 

Sunday, August 23rd

The rain continues. The mood is down. The number of punters is extremely low. There aren’t really enough transactions to know how the new system is going to work. Between the damp and the uncertainty, the vibes are off. Wet people don’t spend money. 

Any festival is an exercise in psychology. A fair like the CNE is an exercise in escapism. It sounds old fashioned, but there are still people out there who save up their physical cash over the course of the summer to come out and have a really big day. I would say that skews to the 905 more than downtown. These people will inevitably grumble about how expensive it is, but that is a part of the process. They’re treating themselves and that separation from how much they would usually spend on something is a signal of the treat quotient involved. 

One of the things that helps with that is abstraction. 

You need, according to the website, 13 tickets to ride the Polar Express and scream if you wanna go faster. You wanna take the Sky Ride? 15 tickets even though it’s no longer a year round installation. I don’t actually know how much an individual ride ticket costs, but Reddit seems to think that it was $10 for 14 tickets last year. So you need to buy a larger increment for the Sky Ride. Maybe there’s a price break at some quantity and maybe there isn’t. I haven’t walked the 200 meters to the other booth to check it out. 

Also there are no physical tickets. It’s all loaded on a card that can easily fall out of your pocket on the rides. So you’ve spent more money than you had to in order to do the thing you wanted to do and you have extra tickets on a card that you need to use up and that means you need to look for something you can use those tickets on and also you have to check the balance anyway, which requires specialized equipment and by that point you’re at the kiosk that sells them anyway.

However, you could get the Ride All Day Pass for $88.38 which includes admission to the grounds and go on all the rides you want for a $55.00 premium over the general admission of $33.38. Except that you can get in for less than that on opening day and also in the evenings during the week and you get a discount with a PRESTO card and if you went to the casino before the CNE opened you can get a free pass for the duration and there are kids’ rates and seniors’ rates and for just a few dollars more you can be in the VIP section to see Tom Cochrane at the bandshell.  

Who decides these prices? Some guy! Is there anything to compare them to on a one to one basis? No! Is it more than last year? Almost certainly.

Any Fair asks people of limited computational ability (which is, let’s face it, everyone) to do math in real time with the dollars in their pocket and when they find that difficult offers them a bench to sit on next to a stall selling Tiny Tom donuts at a price point that you find surprisingly affordable given that the waft of sugared cinnamon has pressed the clear button on the calculator in your brain. As soon as you stop worrying about it because the capturing environment you’re in is patently designed to beat you, you’re on the route to having a decent experience and empty pockets. The bet is that your brain will choose dopamine over worry because that was the goal you set out with.

Beer Festivals are actually harder because there are one to one comparisons. You know how much a can of beer costs at the LCBO or Convenience Store and you know how much a pint costs at a bar and maybe you even seek out happy hour options across the city. 

At a Beer Festival, you enter a capturing environment in which you get a cup and some tokens for your entrance price and then more tokens cost more money. Tokens come at set value and you must use them up or forfeit that value. Every beer nerd in the city has some in their change dish. At Cask Days this year, it will at least make sense. Higher alcohol beers like Amsterdam El Jaguar will cost more tokens. Beers from out of province will cost more tokens. The best day to go in terms of value is Sunday because they’re trying to move the product and are motivated to mark it down. 

You know what the worst received beer festival was in Toronto’s recent history? Blood Brothers Over The Tap. For total transparency, I got into that one for free and I still hated it. You got a glass and a jello shot and then you wandered around the Geary location of Blood Brothers drinking small glasses of rare and collaborative beers. Instead of using a system of tokens or creating a timed session, they opted to have payment stations at each bar for each individual beverage. This meant that every time you got a five ounce sample of a beer, you were paying a different amount of actual money for it using your card or phone. 

Imagine you’ve paid to get into an event and then you have to pay for everything in the event, but instead of an abstract system of value, you’re paying twelve dollars for five ounces of a cask peanut butter and jelly imperial stout collaboration between Third Moon and Blood Brothers and it’s visibly claggy and it sucks. Well, at an event like that you could pay sixty dollars to get a pint of liquid if you include admission to the event. No amount of ambience or playlist is salvaging that. Even the death metal and plaid Blood Brothers fans were pissed at it. Eventually I went next door with Ed and Meoshi and we skulled cans of lager instead. 

You need enough abstraction to allow people to overspend without feeling guilty about it, but not so much that it alienates the audience. 

If you’re running a Beer Festival inside a Fair that already has gated admission, you need a capturing environment for the purposes of abstraction, but not one that demands too much of the marks. Anything that makes them turn the mental calculator back on is going to lose revenue. They’re habituated to physical tokens. They can count them by checking their pockets. 

Our suspicion is that digital tokens which necessitate the use of the smartphone they already use for purchases on the daily break the tenuous psychological illusion that you’re playing with someone else’s money. 

Monday, August 24th

I finally managed to mop.

Not much happens on the evening shift on a Monday and although the weather is improved, we’re shut down by 10:30. 

The vibes continue to be off, and Jeff Broeders and I commiserate a little by the Indie Alehouse tent (Samurai Cat and Parkette are both tasting great). We feel as though the pending trade war with the Americans is at least partially to blame, and the fact that we’ve all been dealing with an economic downturn since about 2019 is a real issue. Because of the cost of living having increased so much in that time period, the amount of disposable income floating around out in the demographics who would attend a Fair is probably at a ten year low. 

The Carneys, collectively, are wistful for the first year back from the Pandemic when the public were spending like drunken sailors and the tips nearly doubled the wage.

Tuesday, August 25th

Two tourists from Stuttgart would like to see Toronto’s food scene and since it is a father and son duo with no dietary restrictions, we’re going for the classics. At Carousel, the apple fritters look extremely good and I sub one in place of the butter tart. “Er ist ein apfelkuchen aus Cobourg, an hour east of here.” Much is made of Canadian measurements in metric/imperial/temporal. Distance in hours, height in feet, groceries in grams. 

We end up at Great Lakes Brewpub when it turns out the Germans like beer. The Helles, Absacker, causes laughter but is out, but the Czech Pilsner goes down a treat. As ever with the Great Lakes Brewpub, the beer is great and the food is not just good but interesting. Try the soy and pineapple chicken wings, especially during their daily happy hour. Sort of Filipino. I find the open concept vibe of the place doesn’t really mesh with the brand identity, but it may simply be that it doesn’t feel lived in. It took the new Bar Volo about five years to get to lived in.

The news about Dolly Parton comes in just after the tour ends at about the time the lake is getting renamed by our cousins to the south. The dichotomy between the best and worst of America couldn’t really be thrown into much sharper relief. Speaking as a semi-professional Carney, I’m always amazed that people buy the snake oil, but the narrative structure of showmanship and performance is so inculcated in America that it’s valued by many above morality or law.

Dolly Parton owned her own theme park for goodness sake, but she understood the kayfabe. She’s in sequins and wigs and stage makeup as a matter of profession, but those are just the tools of the trade; It’s how you draw them in. She was a hatchetwoman for decency and humanity and she made that message fun. If Johnny Cash was the man in black, she wore a suit of lights. She had a fortune that bought rhinestones rather than diamonds. Name anyone else who could have made a movie about a legendary Texas bordello wholesome.

Trump is the complete opposite. Even if the carnival games are rigged, you should at least come away with some value from them. Entertainment or a kewpie doll. He doesn’t believe in anything other than “mine,” a sentiment most toddlers outgrow. He would be a pitiable figure if he weren’t so hell bent on his wretchedness as an avatar of greed. He’s attempting to play keep away with reality, but at some point it is going to go badly wrong and probably soon. A man from the WWE hall of fame who doesn’t understand that the booker holds the pencil.

I find myself sitting on Sugar Beach and having a cry about it, looking out at the lake and listening to Dolly’s Trio record with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. There’ll be justice further along.

Wednesday, August 26th

I’m down to one teenage German for the morning and I have been hired to shepherd him through the city. He’s a conscientious kid with good questions and I show him Yorkville (in retrospect, the Crystal at the ROM seems prescient and a fine indicator of the glass and steel towers that now jut from Metropolis), Queen’s Park, Kensington, Chinatown, City Hall, and leave him at the ferry terminal with enough cash to buy himself some lunch and maybe go to the CN Tower or Aquarium if he gets bored. 

An avuncular figure for hire, that’s me. Your Hal need a Falstaff? Look no further. Polonius, but not felonius. This above all to your own self be true. Seeing the city through a younger set of eyes from a town where everything is six stories tall reminds you how good we have it in Toronto.

Back at the CNE in the evening after 18,000 steps, the vibe is back. The windows have been removed from the booths so people can hear us and they have switched to forward facing credit card terminals so we have the possibility of being tipped without having to verbalize that portion of the transaction. People were not very willing to supply their personal details on our terminals and in combination with the awkwardness of that exchange it felt like we were holding them hostage with the tip screen, so we’re happy to have ended up slightly more low tech. We’re relaxing into the rhythm of the thing and doing bits with the customers. 

For years this was the closest I got to vacation. The people watching is tremendous. I know people who are misanthropic and I have very little time for it. Cynicism is a waste of your time even if you’re effectively selling cans of beer for sixteen bucks a throw to a captured market. Yeah, Toronto may be an hour from Toronto and it might cost fifty bucks to go outside, but it’s a balmy summer night and the lake don’t care what it’s called. In 2026, anyone brave enough to leave the house should be given the benefit of the doubt. 

Thursday – Saturday, August Whenever

TOOOOOKENS!