DirkFunk

Your posts never disappoint. I feel like doing a similar trip since I know Elich's might be closing and it's cheap enough since it's Frontier's home airport so I'm interested to see the responses here too. Counterpoint: These parks look like they suck and I don't smoke weed. Been there, done that, got that t-shirt, pour me another beer. Also, heads up that airport is in the middle of f*cking nowhere. We had a connection there one and couldn't believe it. Unfortunately it was a 40 minute connection so we didn't have time to hit the sh*tty parks. You go to Lakeside at night. You go during the day, you're an idiot. Like you did everything wrong in life and you are a bad person. It's a weird throwback park. Flyers are OK. Whip is fun. You basically look at neon, ride the front of the Cyclone a bunch with its stationary lapbars that do nothing and the Wild Chipmunk because of course. Elitch's and Lakeside could both be gone in 5 years, and real estate in Denver is too valuable for a park. Sucks but that's how it is.

If there's no lockers, I'm sure you can leave it with the folks at the main entrance/admin. FWIW I wouldn't worry about the crowd there. Coaster enthusiasts more often than not see brown folks and start looking for car doors to lock. You'll probably have a lot more to worry about at Elitch's simply because it draws larger crowds of unattended adolescents seeking cheap thrills instead of primarily families looking for a cheap night of entertainment. Twister II is a front car ride for sure, assuming it is open. Elitch's sucks, BTW. Lakeside is fun but I'm sure you've heard that they're sticklers about photography because apparently people are sketched out like you're a molester looking to get pictures of kids. Probably that happened once and they caught it whereas it probably happens everywhere and most parks just want to sell people Pepsis and t-shirts and didn't notice. Waterworld probably has the coolest non-coaster attraction in the area with a water slide that has dinosaur animatronics but I doubt you'll have time for that. Also weed is legal.

There's a non-zero sum possibility that there's no real thought put into this other than "save money because our attendance is actually down right now".

Filed under the "What really grinds my gears" section: There's plenty of legitimate complaints brought up by coaster enthusiasts. The problem is that there's tons of really stupid ones too. 20 years ago, B&M built Oblivion, a ride that is basically less than the post-block on Yukon Striker. People went wild. People actually still pretend even now that Oblivion is kinda good. Now they build Yukon Striker, and all I hear about is the how much some 19 year old twinks don't like the way the post-block looks. That's why we get branded as entitled man children and none of the real issues are addressable or discussable.

Either a bunch of guests who never followed or tweeted at one another conspired in line to tweet a false thing about Cedar Point all around 11:15-11:30AM or a wheel fell off Steel Vengeance.

There's nothing else for it really to be. It's either going to be that kind of attraction or its gonna become luxury mountain top housing (in an area that is pretty much Methville, NC) ot its gonna sit idle for a few decades/forever.

Wait... so maybe I missed it somewhere, but wallets are kosher? I was under the impression it was everything. There's a sign now out front (at least there was this past weekend) which basically said: -No cell phones at all, period, end of story -Small items (keys, wallets basically) are OK in buttoned/zippered/secured pockets only -Glasses with straps are OK It looked like a very permanent sign, so I take that to mean that's the deal.

I'll just leave this here: http://www.parkscope.net/2018/01/how-is-theme-park-labor-market-formed.html Labor force participation by students is way, way down because the pressure to attend college and prepare for it or one's degree is extremely real and very different from 20-30-40 years ago. As far as getting jobs at Cedar Fair parks instead of college - yeah, nah, not if they want to eat. Seasonal parks don't offer much for opportunity compared to even fast food or landscaping. You can make good money doing sales for a landscaping company that might take you 7-8 years to reach for income as a theme park employee.

Mirabilandia has that spinning bin system where people in the end of the queue line getting ready to be assigned seats place their loose articles on iSpeed. Sure enough, you return to the station, and the bin has circled around with your stuff in it. Ferrari World also has the system of tupperwares and bins prior to boarding but near the end of the queue line with attendants there to check it in and give you a tag to go on the ride with. You collect your stuff at the exit. There's a lot of creative solutions, but they take creativity and often actual labor to make happen. The easier thing is to try and make thousands of people use a block of 150 lockers and shrug when you run out of them.

Depends on the field you enter. A friend of mine worked his way through a masters degree managing a Food Lion. He couldn't get a sniff in DC in spite of having internships at prestigious organizations and a top notch degree because he was "the supermarket guy". And when it comes to graduate school applications, I can tell you this from watching it first hand - no one cares if you worked a job. What they want is activity applicable to the degree. If you bussed tables to get through college and someone else had the chance to volunteer 20 hours a week in a lab, that second person is more desirable by a ton. I say that as a paid employee of possibly the most prestigious public university in the US. If I had a kid, I'd advise them to spend their summers in classes instead of working for $9/hr because completing their college degree in the shortest amount of time would pay dividends down the line. Aside from maybe doing the Disney College Program, no employer is gonna care about what garbage job you had when you were a teenager when you're looking to get into a professional setting.

You and I both know why this is. Holiday World will pay for extra staff. These parks are cutting their staff wherever possible to try and reduce operational costs and increase profit margin.

I'll say this about "the kids" - for a lot of fields, working every summer and supporting yourself doing a job with your classes is no benefit whatsoever. It's actually a net negative, because it means you weren't doing unpaid internships related to your field. This is especially true in policy and finance fields. Kids are also being pushed harder than ever to commit to getting AP credits, going to universities, taking classes in summer, and obtaining advanced/terminal degrees while partaking in a variety of extramural activities in order to hopefully obtain scholarships. Pay-For-Play soccer exists in America largely because parents see their kid's high school and travel team activities as a cheaper alternative to paying for a state school and books by getting their sons or daughters a free ride (that is often promised). All this means much lower labor force participation. You can't have it both ways, after all: do we want ride operators or do we want the best educated, most driven, highest competing labor force in the world? BTW: Cedar Point was packed this weekend Bill, so maybe there's just been some weird delay in people turning out to the parks.

Cedar Fair's parks predominantly draw from red/"purple" states - Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia. These are places which will feel the strongest negative effects of trade war as they are involved in the manufacturing of durable goods or agriculture about to be tarriffed and possibly driven out of existence. Cedar Fair is also betting that Congress will be able to push increasing the number of J-1 and H-2B visas, which they openly admit their corporate tax savings are going to building dorm rooms for. They need that to keep the cost of labor down, as they are otherwise competing in the open market for workers and going to be forced to raise pay. Six Flags has a stronger presence in the "blue" states, and is less likely to be affected. The price of oil increasing again to make shale profitable doesn't benefit Cedar Fair in any way. It is much more likely to positively affect Six Flags as their parks in Texas are much closer to that action.

Always wondered why they hadn't done anything appreciable for it. Now we know. I assume given the space that it'll be another flat ride with a lot of the markers probably being planters or something (it can't jut out too far into the entrance way from Magnum).

It's sinking, obviously.

First Blue Streak was too rough. Then Raptor was too loud. Now Gatekeeper is too rough. WTF is with this hobby?

Cedar Point, like Disney and Universal, has a definite pull for a lot of people who are interested in working in the industry. The housing on site only goes to benefit those people further. But Cedar Point is also short handed on a pretty permanent basis these days, so maybe paying people a little more money wouldn't hurt. You know, since the market for labor is also a market, and you still need to compete. Now, to answer the original poster's question: it used to be that going to Cedar Point and succeeding there would be a fast track to getting a permanent job elsewhere in the chain. With the management having turned over a few times and the new Bowling Green deal, I have no idea if that will be true next year or 3 years from now. If you are in a financially good position at Valleyfair working there, I would say to stick around. The smart thing to do -the ONLY thing to do if you are serious about working in parks - is to look at those directors and upper echelon managers and let them know that you will take any opportunity that comes up. Food, games, group outings, whatever division it is, you're interested. It is going to be very difficult to get your foot in the door for a permanent job only knowing and doing rides. If that's what you want to do at CP, I don't know that it is gonna benefit you really should that be the goal.

"Tell Cedar Point to put buzzbars back on Blue Streak and build some dark rides, and maybe I'd feel less like going there."

There's parks that have it. I think even like Wild Eagle has this at Dollywood. Parks argue that bins are bad because they "slow dispatches", which is their code for "we have to staff more people on the station to ensure we can leave in a timely fashion". Disney doesn't have these issues because they spend money. That's what it all comes back to.

Oh, no glasses now too? Hmm. I'll have to write them and confirm what their policy is before I bother to go again.

I'm sure CP has redirected enough personnel to make sure lockers are working adequately and effectively for the literal thousands of guests now needing one before entering the line. Why would I believe otherwise? That's a park that has never had issues effectively staffing before. I hope before I go back in a couple weeks that they have something figured out that will lead to me actually riding Steel Vengeance again rather than dealing with a clusterF when I get to the back of the park. If I can't ride the thing with a zippered pouch containing my credit cards/cash/pass attached to my person via carabiner (I'll even go back pocket, as uncomfortable as that is!), I doubt I'll bother.

They're allowed to do whatever. I'll just skip bringing my phone into the park. As long as they keep the rides open and running like they've been the rest of the season, I'll get on rides and have a good time. If they don't and I get bored, I'll leave. That's pretty easy for me.

The layout is totally bonkers. Love the theme and think it was genius to have a whole "Steelers Experience" with it akin to some of the ones I see other teams have (Wife and I did Barca FC's last year that's across from the Sagrada Familia - fun and great price of $0!) in that it is gonna draw people who aren't even interested in the rides to check it out.

If attendance has plateaued and is receeding and with it revenue is dropping, then most people looking for a growth stock aren't going to see it in their future with labor costs rising and tarrifs likely to lead to a variety of cost increases as well. Ergo, they headed for the door now rather than wait around.

Tickets are $9. Just man up and go.