An RRC Post About Great Adventure and Mark Shapiro

[GADVwow]

Once something appears on rec.roller-coaster on USENET, it's in the public domain.

Coastin Steve, who some of you no doubt know, just posted this.  It's important enough I think it also belongs here, and so it is:

    I know that here at the RRC many of our favorite to bust on parks
are Six Flags.   For some reason the things they do wrong get noticed
more by us than the same things done
wrong by other park chains and individual parks.
(why that is I'll never understand,  but it IS I can assure you )

  One of the things that the SF corp did wrong was spend too much money
to try and give us the thrills we were looking for.   8-(
    So,   they were forced to change owners / management.
   So what does the new owner do ?
   He puts a guy in charge that knows NOTHING about amusement parks or
the amusement park industry.

   By the time Mr Shapiro gets done cut, cut, cutting and sell, sell,
selling there's not going to be anything left that ANYBODY is going to
want to go to next year.

  Sure we all know about the "get back to the family" new attitude that
supposedly is the focus of the new marketing team but the character
actors and the parades and other "family" things they added this season
have been done away with,  or cut back so severely that they're
basically gone.  (and not just at the parks they're closing )

   People ALWAYS have complained about GrAdv not having all of it's
rides open,  but now we get to see that even getting WORSE.  After
Shapiro cutbacks,  there's even less staff there to runs the rides
they've got.
AND   running the rides they do have open with less people,   completely
throwing thoroput in the trash.
(moving long lines are one thing,  but not moving long lines make people
not want to come back for YEARS < I know people that STILL won't go to
GrAv because of lines issues they had in the 80's and 90's>)

     I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is or if we have any
choice but to sit back and watch it happen,   but I think,  in the hands
of Mark Shapiro,  we are going to watch the death of the largest park
chain the world has known.
   I think the second golden age of roller coasters is coming to a rapid
conclusion and that Mr Shapiro is leading the way to make that happen
   I really hope I'm wrong,   but I don't think so
8-(

Coastin  Steve

ps   does anybody have a pic of Mark Shapiro I can put on my dartboard ?
<g>

http://community.webtv.net/Coastin_Steve/CoastinStevesHome

[rjholla2003]

While things aren't great at the moment, I do think that people are over-reacting a bit.  It's the first season that they've run the chain and they didn't even get to plan it.  This isn't their season and I won't bust on them for this season, except for what I think was a poorly planned price increase.  With per capita spending up, what would the chain look like if some people who got turned away by a gate price increase turned out?  With spending up, it seems that a good portion of those who are visiting are happy enough to spend more than last year.  Hopefully the cutbacks they are making now don't kill any good word of mouth that they have built up this season, because that would be a huge obstacle to overcome.

I still can't get over the fact that they are doing this in August.

[GADVwow]

...which is MY point.

The paying customer, for the most part, doesn't know or care who manages the parks or how the park was last week, last month or will be next week.  They KNOW darn well how the park was the day they visited...and they tell LOTS of people, especially if their experience was a bad one.

If the things we are reading here are accurate, those who visit the park the rest of this season will be VERY hard to get back as repeat business.  Besides, during the last conference call, I believe Mr. Shapiro said that customers who see a show or interact with a character spend 48 percent more than those who don't.  And his great idea now is to cut back on characters?  Does this make ANY sense?  Those characters make little more than minimum wage in most cases.  They have got to be major revenue generators.

And if they are cutting back on characters, can we be assured that safety and security are not also being compromised?  Til now, I would have said ABSOLUTELY.  With Mr. Shapiro, all I can say is I don't know.  I just don't know.

[WadeJ]

I'm not in the mood to comment much on this post right now - but I can assure you after my visit today/tonight, I would NEVER go back to that place if this were my first ever visit AND had paid full price.  It sucked.

They can't even get a freaking ROCK N' TUG to work right!    I should know, we were stuck on it for 15 freaking minutes with a mute ride operator that apparantly could tell us nothing.  Then the mute supe came over to rock n' tug it back into place without so much of a word...... Happy freaking anniv.

I'm right behind Steve as the BIGGEST supporter and fanboy this park has but after seeing it now, I'm worried... sorry guys.

[ChuckR]

I don't understand how every other Rockin Tug can operate fine. But GADV can't get theres going, I just don't get it.

[CoasterPete]

I do have to mention that I was at the park on Sunday July 23rd and Tango was open in the morning.  Both Toro and Tango opened with the park at 10am.  However, about 2 hours later it was closed but everytime we were over there, there was a maintenance worker futsing with it. 

Pete

[Robert T Ackerman]

It was open all of those days that Toro wasn't open... I thought it was a staffing thing, even though it really only takes 1 person to run that thing. My list of friends who have no desire to return to the park is growing more this year than it ever has in the past. Strange, but true.