Puyallup Fair attendance flat, but officials happy

The Puyallup Fair ended its 17-day run Sunday night, but the grounds still were bustling the next morning.

Workers packed up food, broke down cooking equipment, dismantled rides and hauled off trash.

Korinna Schweitzer, who manages the Stir Fry stand in the restaurant building near the Red Gate, used a rag to clean the metal surfaces top to bottom.

“Overall, it was a pretty good fair,” she said Monday.

But it wasn’t as busy as in years past.

The fair drew 1,059,182 people this year, down 6,026 from 2010.

Workers such as Schweitzer said they saw a drop in sales.

At the Louie’s hamburger stand in the restaurant building, employee Carley Haynes said concerts brought dinner rushes, but “I’ve worked here four years and it was the deadest it’s ever been.”

Fair officials said the weather likely was a factor. The opening days were hot, but the middle and final weekends – usually the busiest – were rainy.

The economy likely also played a role. Food vendors said some fairgoers watched their pocketbooks, eating beforehand or bringing snacks from home.

Other kinds of booths may have fared better.

At the Artists in Action gallery, “we expected a downturn with the economy,” said Betty Bell, consulting assistant. But there was a mix of well-known and new artists, and sales were good, she said.

The fair saw its biggest year-over-year attendance gain on the second Monday – Sept. 19 – when it drew 66,350 people, up 22,478 over the same day in 2010. In general, weekdays were busier this year – possibly due to the Tacoma teachers strike that closed schools for eight days.

The biggest year-to-year drop was last Saturday. The crowd numbered 121,936 people, down 18,186 over the closing Saturday last year.

In 2010, total attendance was 1,065,208 people. Each of the previous five years, it broke 1.1 million.

Karen LaFlamme, fair spokeswoman, said fair officials aren’t concerned about the drop.

“There are so many factors that come into play” when it comes to attendance, she said. “When we’re over that 1 million mark, we feel really comfortable.”

Some highlights of this year’s fair were the sold-out Selena Gomez concert; two new free acts that proved popular – an aerial show and mountain boarders, a kind of all-terrain skateboarding; and a record-breaking food drive, she said. On the fair’s opening day, roughly 160,000 pounds of food was collected for the Puyallup Food Bank.

And about halfway through the fair, Fisher Scones served its 100 millionth scone, to a woman from Georgia.

Fairgoers reported the usual gripes – parking and traffic congestion, long lines and the expense. On the fair’s Facebook page, one woman wrote that the fair’s theme – which this year was “Make Your Escape” – should have been, “escape into debt.”

But others praised the fair.

“Love, love, love the Puyallup Fair!” a Facebook poster wrote.

One change this year affected transportation. Pierce Transit eliminated its special-event service in a round of budget cuts, and the fair hired the private Cincinnati-based First Student bus company to provide shuttles to fill the gap.

The shuttles left from three fewer locations than Pierce Transit’s did last year, so making year-to-year comparisons is tricky, fair officials said.

But this year’s ridership was down about 40 percent from the average on Pierce Transit’s fair express buses, fair officials said.

Still, “to introduce something new – we feel it went extremely well,” LaFlamme said.

“Overall, we feel really good about how (the fair) turned out,” she said. “It was a great 17-day fair.”

Sara Schilling: 253-552-7058
sara.schilling@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/street