Birthday Party Inflation Hits Loot Bag Sector, Parents Now Issuing Cover Charges At The Door
A Mississauga mother of two has begun asking guests to chip in $22 toward her daughter's seventh birthday, a figure she arrived at by dividing the trampoline park deposit by the number of children who actually RSVP'd instead of the number invited.
"The cake alone was $85, and that was the grocery store one with the airbrushed unicorn," she said. "The loot bags have a fibre supplement in them now. That's how deep we are."
Economists who spend their time on more serious matters have nonetheless noticed something odd. The kids' party sector appears to be the only part of the Canadian economy achieving genuine value-added processing. We ship raw wheat abroad and buy it back as crackers, but a Canadian parent can take one bag of flour, forty minutes, and a piping bag, and produce a $60 sheet cake shaped like a backhoe. That is a 1,400 per cent markup performed entirely on domestic soil by an unpaid workforce.
Ottawa has spent years talking about capturing more of the food processing chain. Meanwhile in the suburbs of Barrie, a father of three has independently established a vertically integrated pizza operation, a beverage licence arrangement with his neighbour, and a rental agreement for a bouncy castle that clears more per hour than a fully loaded grain car.
The party economy also solves labour shortages by conscripting grandparents, and resolves supply chain risk by simply defaulting to a park.
The children, for their part, remain indifferent. Nine of them spent the trampoline hour standing in a corner, watching a boy named Declan eat a slice of pizza upside down. Total cost of that experience: $198 plus tax.
Declan's mum has requested the recipe.