Six Flags: Business like a roller coaster?

Monday, July 19, 2004

Yesterday was a beautiful day. Partly cloudy, high in the 80s, not too humid, light breeze occasionally. Perfect day to spend outdoors.

Amy and I originally planned to go to Ha Ha Tonka State Park, but we got to bed late on Saturday and were daunted by the 150 mile drive each way. Instead, stunned by the realization that Six Flags St. Louis was about 30 miles from us, we decided to go there. Been jonesing for coasters for a while.

It was a lot of fun, but also interesting. A beautiful Sunday in mid-July, but the park was practically empty. Our longest wait to get on a ride was probably 10-15 minutes. Normally, we could walk through the queues right up to the "select a car" queues and only had to wait a couple runs of the coaster to ride. In about 3 hours there, we hit every big coaster (Mr Freeze (twice), Batman, Ninja, Screaming Eagle, The Boss), the newer non-coaster Excalibur, and sat down for a bite to eat. We weren't in the mood for any water rides, but otherwise we rode everything we wanted to.

We had heard that Sundays tended to be a better time to visit theme parks, but I would have thought that the park would be somewhat close to capacity. About a third to a half of the little stores and games were closed, including the photo booths at the end of most of the rides. If this is typical attendance for a beautiful summer Sunday, it's no wonder that theme parks are in trouble.

How much trouble are they in? Well, just being there you could see that business was down. Although Six Flags has never been concerned about theming as Disney, there was a time when they made the attempt. The best theming was Batman, introduced in 1995. The whole queue was themed, with gardens outside and an industrial motif inside. The theming was carried to nearby buildings. But by 1998, when Mr. Freeze was introduced, they basically themed the building but not the outside queue, and didn't even bother to landscape. 2000's addition, "The Boss" has no theming to speak of and they didn't even bother to paint most of the queue rails. (I guess that's part of the theming since they're emphasizing that it's a wooden coaster, but still.)

The theming of restaurants and other buildings shows a decline, too. The chicken place we had lunch at originally had shaped plastic chair seats, but it as they broke they were replaced with featureless disks. Landscaping was minimal, and full of weeds. Painted areas hadn't been painted in at least a couple seasons.

It seems that this general decay hadn't affected the actual operation of the rides. But even there, it seems that non-safety related problems get delayed attention. Mr. Freeze's "icy tunnel" wasn't set quite as cold as it used to be. Batman had sensor problems on some of the seats showing that they weren't buckled although they were, which kept stopping the ride through the day.

The "new ride metric" is another way to show the decline. Seems like when I was growing up, Great America had a new coaster every year or two. St. Louis didn't have that many, but it got a new coaster every three or so years. But recently, the only added rides have been small kiddy rides, the non-Coaster XCalibur, and a few cheap (and low capacity) bungy rides which have additional charges.

Show frequency is also way down. Instead of having at least something every day, there were only two or three a month. They never interested me personally, but I've spoken to a bunch of people who said it made it more fun for the non-riders in a party. More fun equals more visits.

Six Flags seems to be caught in a vicious circle. Without plenty of visitors, it's hard to get the money to really maintain the part and keep up with new exciting rides. But without those things, how will they convince people to come? I like the idea of dynamically dropping the price on days with low attendance... just publish it on their website or email people who have signed up. But I don't own the place.

Copyright © 2005 by Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>