NC State Fair: Balling on a Budget, as the Kids Say

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, take out your calculators: it’s time to crunch some numbers. For two weeks every October, the NC State Fairgrounds in Raleigh hosts the most-anticipated bash of the year: The North Carolina State Fair. Children scream in anticipation, carnies stock up on cheap Chinese-made prizes and pet goldfish, and fathers everywhere feel a phantom pain in the general location of their wallet. The North Carolina State Fair has never been cheap, but believe it or not, there’s a way to make the State Fair fair-priced – and I did it.

Tickets go on sale online almost a month in advance of the event itself. If you buy them online beforehand, the tickets are $10; if you wait to purchase your ticket at the gate, it’ll run you $13. The absolute cheapest way to get in is to take advantage of the special Discount Days. Thursday, October 19th is Smithfield Foods Hunger Relief Day, and in exchange for six cans of food, you get in for free. A can of house-brand creamed corn or green beans costs 64 cents, so your “admission” would only cost $3.84 (plus tax). Those are prices I can get behind.

Packages, too, are worth looking at to save some cash. A Dizzy Pass, $38 dollars, is good for a single day and gets you unlimited rides. Rides cost about $5-$6 dollars a pop, and a regular Unlimited Ride Wristband will run you $30 on its own. So, buying the specialty Pass reduces your admission cost to $8 if you’re the kind of person who likes to ride every single attraction at the State Fair.

I, however, do not trust massive metal contraptions set up on bricks and put together by traveling carnies, so I would not be requiring a pass nor a budget for rides. The only thing I’d really be spending besides admission was parking. Most lots are $20 for the entire day. There are other, cheaper options that require a shuttle ride to and from the gate, but I chose to pay for convenience. In total honesty, that’s also where my GPS routed me, and I was too stressed out about all of the cops and barricades to go searching for another parking lot.

But, having paid and parked, it was time to consider what really mattered: the food.

Since outside food and drink are permitted on the fairgrounds, I packed water bottles in order to avoid paying through the nose for a Dasani – but my goodness, no pre-packaged nonsense you could stick in your see-through bag could ever compare to the deep-fried goodness of the State Fair. With inflation causing prices to skyrocket, I knew that I’d have to set aside some serious cash for those treats.

The first stop had to be for an order of 6 battered and deep-fried Oreos, soft and sugary on the inside, smothered in powdered sugar. It ran me $10 dollars – but, since I was paying with a credit card, not cash, I was given a dollar upcharge. Don’t make my mistake: at the State Fair, cash is king. Hit the ATM beforehand.

I washed down my Oreos with a cost-effective sweet tea. The lemonade at the fair is heavenly, but costs you nine bucks. The sweet tea stand, by comparison, was running a special. If you bought the souvenir Halloween mug for five dollars (six with card, to my chagrin) you could get a free refill. A regular drink costs $7 with $2 refills, so I saved myself three bucks and got twice as much drink. Not to mention, that stand had variety! Southern style, Arnold Palmer, peach tea, blackberry tea, you name it.

Now, since I couldn’t get all of my sustenance from saturated fats, sugars, and carbohydrates, I went on the hunt for some real food. Massive turkey legs and Hot-Cheeto-encrusted ears of corn could be seen across the horizon. The smell of fried okra and fried scallops, hush puppies sticky with soda-flavored glazes, Jerk spices, Cajun seasoning, and Greek flavors all going to war in the fall air. When everything looks good, how on earth can we be expected to choose?

As dictated by my budgetary restrictions, I let my wallet guide me. Just about everything was going to run me $10-$15 dollars, so I chose an item with the most bang for my buck. A bucket of chicken tenders and fries (three sad, decrepit looking chicken fingers and a whole potato’s worth of fries to compensate) was a whopping fifteen dollars. On the other hand, an ear of sweet corn as big as my head crusted with Nacho Cheese Doritos was ten. Even better, the ladies at the stand were yelling out the order numbers in Spanish, so I knew this would be some high-quality, genuine elote.

Let me tell you, that was some of the best corn I’d ever had. I was tempted to go back for a second ear before we left. Perfectly cheesy, not overpowering. Every bite was culinary perfection. Alas, I never got the chance to go back for the Hot Cheeto flavor, since my group of friends preferred to get a massive cinnamon-sugar pretzel instead. That twisted treat closed out our tab for the day.

It was ten dollars for a ticket, twenty for parking. Over the course of my trip, I indulged in a lemonade, two sweet teas, deep fried Oreos, elote, and a massive cinnamon-sugar pretzel; nine dollars, six dollars, eleven, ten, and twelve, for a grand total of $78.

However, I went on this trip with my boyfriend and two other friends. The lemonade was my boyfriend’s (-$9), and he treated me to the corn (-$10). My friend and I split the pretzel, and she offered to pay (-$12). So, my total came to $47 for a whole day’s worth of eating at the State Fair. Buy tickets in advance, park far, and bring cash, sure… but the cheapest way to get through the NC State Fair is with a few generous friends who will buy it all for you!

---Delaney Guidi