Countering this trend has been the recent success of Prime Time Carnival, operated by Amanda Stine and Josh Macaroni, who formed this company in 2015. Both are third generation midway providers, Macaroni oversees the rides and Stine has a variety of responsibilities including running the show office, safety compliance, spotting trailers, and training.
Her Game
Games, however, are in Stine’s blood. Her grandfather, China Stine ran game concessions with Royal American Shows and Kissel, as did her parents, John and Sheila Stine with Link Shows, who eventually formed Stine Amusements, where Amanda cut her teeth. Her parents passed away in 1999, Amanda got into the game business starting Prime Time Concessions in 2006, with upwards of 26 games and booking with carnival companies such as Reed Expositions, Murphy Brothers Exposition, and Reithoffer Shows.
Stine and her partner Joshua Macaroni – whose parents, Dominic and Ruby, owned Family Attractions – started Primetime Carnival Company, blending Macaroni’s two rides with the games and concessions.
“Eventually games weren’t enough,” explained Stine. “I could book more spots if we had some rides. We had to buy a few rides, but now we could play fairs and still dates.
The ride complement – major attractions were the slide, Ring of Fire, Wheel and Alpine Bobs – proved to be the minimum needed to play still dates and fairs. The going was rough however. “It was horrible at first. We made less money with rides that first year than we did with just games the previous year.”
Gradually the company built up a combination of still dates and local and regional fairs as well as subcontracting on a handful of key gigs, filling a 40-week per year route and in addition to the games, the company now has 47 rides and 10 food concessions. “Our combined businesses let us play the bigger events in addition to our mix of still dates.”
Rapid Growth
About 60 percent of the year’s spots are fairs, with the remainder shopping mall lots and other still dates. The route includes Florida, Tennessee and Ohio and the trend Stine hopes continues in 2025 has been the increases in attendance and attendee spending. “Every year has gotten progressively better after COVID, starting in 2022. Many events got a lot better rapidly; the carnival business snapped back and has stayed growing each year.”
Even though inflation can be attributed to some of the revenue spikes – Stine is adamant that “attendance is up at our still dates because of advertising.”
A major factor bumping up turnout has been the Primetime Carnival social media push. The company is active on multiple platforms, including paid promotions and sponsorship. “Attendance is up; it just is. A lot of the reason for that is that it’s so easy to advertise your events. Social media has it made possible for carnivals to reach customers with very little effort.”
Most notably the hyper-local impact of social media, especially Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, which has only grown in effectiveness due to ever expanding usage, has proven the key to the post-lockdown social media marketing blitzes. “Smaller carnivals can market like bigger carnivals with the right social media promotions. With still dates, it’s up to us to get the people out. Some parking lots were a death sentence, with social now that is not the case. People weren’t coming out to parking lot carnivals but now because of the advertising, they hit their phone and find out about the carnival. Additionally, I still print and leave fliers on gas station counters.”
Also adding to the impact of social media marketing has been a steady growth in the reaching the Hispanic market through Spanish language content, courtesy of her H-2B workers.
“The foreign labor helps me out a lot,” she said. “We all take videos, and they text them to me, I edit them together. They’re very excited about a good video. They’ve been helpful with a lot of the wording especially for the translations to the Hispanic market. They make sure the translations contain correct verbiage, which has grown that market.”
Labor
While Primetime uses foreign labor, they are not 100% reliant on it. They recently found success in hiring a new generation of American workers. “I’ve had a lot of success hiring Americans in the 18-22 age group”, says Stine. If the recruit is hired to work on rides, Stine will typically assign them to a ride they have a vested interest in, for example, a 20 year old male would probably enjoy operating a music ride versus a kiddie ride.
“For employees hired to work games or food, if the worker is shy, I will start them working the window of a concession trailer. Once they get used to talking to people, I will move them to games, and train them on operating a game,” she said.
Unlike many carnival companies who tend to limit the use of H-2B workers at games, Stine has found success, but mainly because this veteran games concessionaire trains them. While language is an issue, some of the workers speak better than passable English and many of them are eager to learn English. But along with the language lessons, game expertise classes are held. “I’m teaching them myself. I’ve taught all my people, how to get people playing, building a tip, holding a tip, which is getting a group to become a crowd and keeping them there. These are lost arts.”
With the H-2B program, “every year is a nail-biter whether or not we’ll get our workers.”
The one trend of the past two years Stine has seen with other carnivals is disruptive teens. Fortunately, the show has not had many issues at their own events due to proactive security efforts. Stine has found that the four-legged law enforcement works best. “Everybody has a phone, and those teens just do it for Tik-Tok, and that seems to magnify the problem. I always contract a (k-9) dog. I’ve found one dog is more powerful than 10 police officers. Some teens are not scared of cops, but they’re all scared of the dogs.”
