12 OctOber 9 - 15, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents At the time we spoke, only a few days into fair season, he wasn’t worried yet about how these incremental price increases would af- fect his bottom line — it’s too soon to tell. However, that was also a day before the gov- ernment shut down, which he was worried would negatively affect business by adding further pressure to the economy. Beating a Drum G len Kusak receives 42,000 pounds of smoked turkey legs every week for the fair. He owns Farm Pac Kitchen in Yoakum, a small town near Shiner in South Central Texas, where he smokes and packs turkey. He sells these at his huge Hans Mueller tent at the fair and also supplies several other vendors. “Proteins are high just across the board,” he says. “It seems like in agriculture some- body always loses, but right now the ranch- ers are winning. They’re getting really high prices for the livestock. But everyone down the line gets squeezed.” The bird flu has affected the poultry busi- ness, but Kusak says there’s another disease that hasn’t been covered as much, which is affecting the growth patterns of turkeys and limiting weight gain. “Something’s happen- ing with some other virus,” he says. “The birds just aren’t gaining, and there’s a short- age of supply.” Tight supplies, combined with a rise in the popularity of drumsticks at Renaissance festivals, Oktoberfests and fairs, have cre- ated a perfect storm for prices. Kusak says the turkey price was around $0.60 per pound two years ago and about $0.78 per pound last year. Now, it’s $1.72 a pound. That’s an increase of $0.94 a pound from last year to this year. For his 42,000 pounds, that’s an increase of $39,480 a week, or a total of $72,240 a week in turkey legs. For the three and a half weeks of the fair, his increase in costs for turkey legs from last year to this year is around $135,000. How’s that play out at the fair? “Normally, if we had the markup that a concessionaire would normally take, tur- key drums would be at $28 or $30 each. But we wouldn’t sell any,” he says. His prices went from $22 last year to $24 this year. “So we went up $2, but we really needed to go up about six to cover everything. And we felt guilty at $22 last year, honestly,” he says. “I feel sorry for a family of four that comes out here. No telling what that costs. I mean, just to park, get in the gate, get a soda water or bottle of water, or things like that. It’s prohibitive,” he says. The Hans Mueller tent offers a Thrifty Thursday sausage on a stick for $8, down from the normal daily price of $12. In years past, he set the Thursday price at $7, but those prices are now higher, as are the costs of plastic forks, cups, straws, paper boats and napkins. Deep-Fried and Double Stuffed S tiffler Concessions might best be known for inventing the deep-fried Double Stuffed Oreo. It’s dipped and rolled in pancake batter before a swim in bub- bling oil. The result is a golden puffy ball, crispy on the outside with a melted Oreo in the middle. A shower of powdered sugar adds an- other touch of sweetness. The Stifflers have seven stands around the fairgrounds and burn through more than 80,000 Oreos every 24-day run of the fair, plus 7,000 sticks of butter and almost 3,500 pounds of chocolate chips for their cookie shop. Tammy Stiffler was sipping a cold Red Bull on one of the first days of the fair, wear- ing a cowboy hat and chic overalls, which she said she already regretted under the late Kathy Tran Kathy Tran Increasing workers’ wages and the skyrocketing price of chocolate has been a stress point for business owners like Mark Zable, who sells Belgian waffles. City of Ate from p11 Glen Kusak says bird flu and turkey shortages have severely cut into his margins.
