My wife and I took our kids to some shitty pumpkin patch today. It’s in the middle of a major metropolitan area, and it is billed as a “farm”, although from what I could tell the only thing that it farms is money: Admission for adults is $3.00. Kids will run you $10.00. This is a pricing strategy known in the business as price-gouging bullshit. Here’s what you got for your admission: A hay-ride (a tractor pulling a trailer), a small pumpkin (kids only), access to a bouncy castle (again, kids only, which is a bunch of crap), and for a dollar you could buy a bag of carrots which you could then feed to goats. “Why are we paying to feed their animals?” my wife asked. The answer, of course, is that we’re parents. Continue reading