We Love Your Money. We Hate Your Traffic.
Part of the Real Life collection — practical observations, human behavior, everyday systems, and the realities people often learn the hard way.
Every town wants tourists.
Until they arrive.
Tourists bring money.
Jobs.
Hotels.
Restaurants.
Shopping.
Entertainment.
Tax revenue.
Economic growth.
Then they actually show up.
Suddenly nobody can get a dinner reservation.
Traffic moves at the speed of a funeral procession.
The grocery store runs out of everything.
And locals begin asking the same question people have been asking for generations.
“When exactly are these people leaving?”
Years ago, I lived and worked in Scottsdale, Arizona during the great golf boom of the 1990s.
Every winter the “snowbirds” arrived.
Thousands of them.
They came from Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Canada—anywhere the sidewalks needed shoveling.
Who could blame them?
They traded blizzards for sunshine.
Instead of scraping ice off their windshields, they spent their days golfing beneath cloudless skies while friends back home shoveled another foot of snow.
Scottsdale offered everything they wanted.
The Phoenix Open.
The Barrett-Jackson Auto Auction.
The Arabian Horse Show.
Major League Baseball spring training.
Championship golf courses like Troon North, Grayhawk, and TPC Scottsdale.
Even the Super Bowl came here. And Cirque du Soleil too!
For hotels, restaurants, golf courses, and retailers, those three months were Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday rolled into one.
Many businesses made enough money during peak season to carry them through the rest of the year.
Everyone celebrated tourist season.
Well…
Almost everyone.
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Because the same visitors who kept the economy humming also doubled the population.
Traffic became a daily adventure.
Rental cars drifted slowly down Scottsdale Road while confused drivers searched desperately for street signs.
Turn signals blinked for miles without anyone actually turning.
Paper maps unfolded across dashboards.
Cars stopped in the middle of traffic because someone suddenly spotted the entrance they had just driven past.
Locals developed an almost supernatural ability to identify rental cars from half a mile away.
Not because of the license plates.
Because of the driving.
Restaurants became another casualty.
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The places locals enjoyed all year suddenly had hour-long waits.
So we adapted.
Instead of fighting the crowds, we quietly disappeared into neighborhood bars, family diners, and little restaurants hidden off the beaten path.
Tourists never found them.
That was exactly the point.
Then there was golf.
Scottsdale had some of the finest golf courses in America.
Ironically, the people who lived there often couldn’t afford to play them.
Winter green fees climbed so high that many locals simply waited for summer—or settled for the municipal courses if they could find an affordable tee time.
Troon North in peak season is approaching $400. in 2026.
Imagine living beside world-famous golf courses and becoming a tourist in your own town.
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That’s the Tourist Paradox.
The very people who support your community can also make it difficult to enjoy living there.
Of course, this isn’t unique to Scottsdale.
Beach towns experience it every summer.
Mountain resorts every ski season.
Cruise ports whenever another floating city arrives.
College towns during football weekends.
National parks during vacation season.
Even small tropical towns in the Philippines transform overnight when holiday weekends arrive.
The pattern never changes.
Businesses celebrate.
Residents adapt.
Visitors create prosperity.
They also create inconvenience.
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Neither side is wrong.
One group is trying to enjoy a vacation.
The other is simply trying to get to the grocery store.
Eventually someone in Scottsdale came up with a bumper sticker that perfectly summarized the conflicting emotions every tourist town understands.
“If it’s tourist season…
Why can’t we shoot them?”
No.
Nobody actually wanted to shoot the tourists.
Without them, countless businesses would have struggled to survive.
The bumper sticker wasn’t about hatred.
It was about exasperation.
It captured the impossible contradiction every destination eventually discovers.
We love your money.
We appreciate your business.
We hope you have a wonderful vacation.
We just wish you could spend all that money…
Without being here.
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That’s the Tourist Paradox.
Continue Exploring
Life is full of contradictions. The same people, ideas, and successes that make life better often create unexpected frustrations. These essays explore the paradoxes and trade-offs that quietly shape everyday life.
- The Comment Paradox — Every creator dreams of more comments until success makes replying to all of them impossible.
- The Convenience Trap — Many conveniences solve one problem while quietly creating another.
- The Decision Fatigue Tax — Modern life offers endless choices, but every decision carries a hidden mental cost.
- Explore the Life & Reality Hub — Discover more observations about human nature, everyday contradictions, and the realities we all experience.
Bunker Rule
BUNKER NOTICE: This article uses humor to explore the love-hate relationship between tourism and local communities. The observations are meant in good fun and celebrate the shared experiences of residents and visitors in popular destinations around the world.