France Bleu Isère: Michel Rabbat, you yourself are a showman and owner of two merry-go-rounds at the Foire des Rameaux. How is the recovery going, after two years marked by the pandemic?
Michel Rabbat: We started the season well. I have just come from a park in Avignon, we feel that we had an influence. People needed to escape, to go out, to have a little fun. If things haven’t been going well for two years, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s the pandemic’s fault. We cannot say that it is the cities that have forbidden us to work. Especially that of Grenoble. It is a city that always welcomes its public, always welcomes its merchants, very kindly and always with a smile.
Hoping that this period of Covid-19 is behind us, how do you envision the future?
Today, the recovery is happening. I hope this pandemic will be behind us, that we can do a full season. Again, the past two years have been very tough. We have people at home who had taken out loans, which must be repaid. We are fully-fledged traders, we have the same expenses as our sedentary counterparts. It should be remembered that in our country, people had to start working by the day, converting to truck drivers… They did all kinds of work to be able to get by. Because we have families that we have to support.
How are you approaching this new period marked this time by the rise in electricity and diesel prices?
We suffer like everyone else. The only thing is that today we can’t increase the prices of entrances to our attractions. We are reaching a ceiling stage. If we increase our prices because the amount of our fees increases, it will become a loot fair. And we work with the middle class, so if our costs increase, we have to bear them. We try to calculate today to compensate… We take a piece of paper, a pencil, we add everything up. We look at the expenses we have and we see from the results that the parties [foraines] are in the average recovery. They are still somewhat profitable. But it should not continue to increase.
What are the means at your disposal to compensate for this increase in costs?
We ask the cities, like Grenoble this year, to maintain the pricing of the rights of place, that one does not increase them. Politicians are also suggesting that we reduce VAT to 5% instead of 20 today… So we’ll see where that takes us. But for now, I don’t want to talk about the Grenoble fair, it’s the second nationally. It welcomes a lot of people, so we think we are doing well this season. The remaining problem with this fair is time. The weather is a lottery for us. The weather was nice for a month. And then when we arrived for assembly week, we had snow. So we try to adapt.
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