People are getting excited to hold poo in their hands at this year’s Rotaryfest midway.
They're even putting it on their head.
Every year, the midway — put on by Homeniuk Rides Inc. — has a different set of prizes and often one or two prizes really stick out as crowd favourites.
This year it's plush, large-sized poop emojis.
Emojis are those little faces and icons that you have on your iPhone.
It’s “the year of poop”, said ‘Water Race’ game operator Rick Comartin, around half of whose prizes are the poo emojis.
“Everybody is picking the poo. It’s a very popular item this year… There must be a cartoon or something’ with them on TV. There are toys that stand out and people just go for them. Just like Shopkins or the Pokémon (or) the minions. They each have their season… The poo is new this year and they are just drawn to it,” said Comartin.
Comartin said that the type of prize an operator like himself has can either make or break how well they do in a season.
He has a variety of sizes and color of poo available to win — there’s even rainbow poo.
“I have... from a six inch all the way up to about an 18 inch pile of poo. I didn’t know they piled poo that high,” said Comartin.
Comartin said hundreds of poops will be won at his game during the four nights it's in Sault Ste. Marie and midway owner Randy Homeniuk figures all his midway games combined will probably hand out around 10,000 poops from May to October this year.
The Tubs of Fun ball toss game operators have poop emoji hats to give out and this is really helping them come up with funny sales pitches, says operator Raymond Gratto.
“There are so many lines,” said Gratto.“Get em’ while they're hot’, ‘They’re fresh out of the oven’, (or) 'this is prize is the…”
Some of them can’t be repeated here.
Gratto has two different shades of brown poop emoji hats and he'll jokingly hold them up and ask 'do you like the solid or the runny?'
Operator Sadie Shill said every time someone wins one of the poop hats she tells them they are part of ‘the poo crew’ and then she fist bumps them and instead of making an explosion with her hand she blows a fart sound with her mouth.
“The dads like them a lot. We think they’re winning it for the kids but they really like it for themselves,” said Shill.
The midway is located downtown next to the Rotary Welcome Arch on Bay Street and closes at 11 p.m. on Saturday.