OK, so examples of the horrible operations at SFoG.
Keep in mind that I thought the park itself was great. It’s just terribly run.
Also, I was there for a day and a half, and the terrible operations were on display constantly, at every turn, for that entire period. So it’s hard to isolate a few moments, but I’ll try.
First, patterns. Teenage staff with obviously woeful training and no supervision. Lack of signage or organization. Staff who move in slow motion and never speak. Confused crowds everywhere trying to figure out how to organize themselves, guessing what they would be asked to do if there were anyone in charge present.
OK, some examples:
1. Park entry, first Saturday, then Sunday. On Saturday, the park is supposed to open at ten. There is a sea of barricade gates and signs, but it is as if they were left every which way from a wild party the previous night, and no one thought it necessary to set something up in preparation for the arrival of crowds on a July Saturday. The crowds have absolutely no idea where to go. I don’t mean it simply wasn’t clear which turnstile or gate to line up at. I mean, the signage has people in clumps all across the front of the park for an eighth of a mile. Everywhere you go you can hear the conversations of confusion. Why not just ask an employee, you might wonder? Because there are none. NONE. As if the park were simply closed. As ten o’clock approaches and still no one is there, the crowds get more agitated, and I can hear everywhere the confusion turning to stress and irritation. Then it is actually ten o’clock, park opening time, and still there is not a single employee anywhere in sight! Finally, minutes after ten o’clock employees appear and open a single entrance on one end of the crowds. Employees upbraid 95% of the crowds for lining up in the wrong places, as if scolding unruly schoolchildren. Apparently, it doesn’t occur to them that if thousands of people are utterly confused, the fault may just lie in the organization of the system.
Sunday. Sunday park opening is very similar to Saturday, except there were fewer people arriving early. I am at the gate, and this time the signage has been moved around, and I am determined to follow it and figure out if there is a system here. It starts moving me through a serpentine sort of labyrinth, but I never went anywhere except by following a sign. Finally it led me to a single gate that was totally open. Now some parks do let early arrivers enter the park up to certain barriers, and I certainly was not trying to sneak in as I had a Diamond Elite pass in my hand. Tentatively, I walk in and there’s just no one around. Finally, a security guard on a golf cart approaches me and condescendingly asks what I’m doing. I told him I was actively TRYING to follow the rules and just followed signs at each step. He told me there’s no way the signs could have led me in here. Now I have no interest in being a pest — as an enthusiast I actually WANT to be a good patron who follows the rules, but I couldn’t help insisting that I had followed the signs. I didn’t push it as I didn’t want to give him a hard time, but I did want to say, “Blame me if you like, but your admission setup is total chaos.”
He escorts me back outside, and then you can repeat the crowd chaos from the day before.
2. Flash pass. The Flash Pass office at any park can get long lines, but they open early to try to crank people through as fast as possible. In this case, the friend I was with on the Saturday decided to spring for platinum passes for us. We joined a line in the hot sun outside the door of the Flash Pass office, but they didn’t open the office until half an hour after the park was operating and the coasters were taking riders. There’s just something particularly absurdly irritating about spending money to save waiting time and get more time on coasters, but then wasting 45 minutes in the hot sun waiting for the opportunity to do this in the first place.
Then in the coaster lines the Flash Pass lines were very often half-staffed or not staffed at all. When they were half-staffed, someone would check our tickets to enter the line, but where the Flash Pass entered the station, there was no one there to control the flow of people in, and there was no one to control the flow of people from the regular line to the station. This left the patrons in both lines in charge, and it immediately became apparent that they were two lines openly competing for the same slots in the station. This meant no one stopped anywhere; everyone just jammed in making the stations wall to wall people. This was so bad that if the Flash Pass line entered the station toward the front of the train and the regular line entered toward the back of the train, there was no way a Flash Pass person could ever get through the crowd to the back half of the train, and there was no way anyone in the regular line could ever got to the front half of the train.
When there was no staff at all on the Flash Pass line, everything was the same except that no one ever checked any passes, so anyone could enter any line and never get caught.
3. Ride ops. Again, daunted by too many choices, I’ll just choose one moment on Goliath. In my experience, B&M hypers are people eaters with huge put-through capacities. Not in this case.
The ops move as if they’re auditioning for the role of someone whose puppy died an hour ago. They have sullen expressions and they never speak — not to the riders with instructions, and not to each other. That alone cannot meet safety protocols. Then there is the speed at which they move. They walk so slowly that it would require a great effort from me to move so glacially. They don’t even walk so much as shuffle, as if reluctantly. Basically, they look as if someone has been forcing them at gunpoint to work nonstop for the last one thousand years.
Again the station is slammed wall to wall with people. Many are sitting on the floor. For a B&M hyper! I am waiting for the back of the train. In between dispatches, the ops throughout the park just seem to go down and stop, rather than constantly moving to prepare the next dispatch as they do at every other Six Flags park. In this case, they don’t even pay enough attention to the fact that the last six rows of riders who just came in from a ride have not been released from their restraints. One op comes over to the sixth from the back row and seems to think these are new riders. They have to tell him that they have already ridden and can’t get out. He manually releases them, they get out, and new passengers get in. But this is when my jaw really dropped. Instead of realizing the situation and jumping into overdrive, he does this incredibly slow, ambling shuffle to the fifth from last row. Meanwhile, the gates shut so no new riders can get in, even if the old riders weren’t still trapped in their seats. Bear with me now and visualize all this. He slowly, SLOWLY reaches over to release the fifth from last row of riders. The riders in the gates waiting to get on express frustration mixed with disbelief — are they going to let us on? Now the entire train and everyone in the station — including a stacked train sitting on the brake run for many minutes in the baking sun — are waiting for this drama to play out. Sloooowly, he makes his way to the fourth to last row and slowly releases them. Then sloooowly he does the same for the third to last row. Then he goes to the second to last row and checks to make sure their restraints are on tight. Understand this: despite all that I have been describing he was unaware or somehow forgot that the last two rows were also trapped previous riders. The girls in the very back row had amused me with how extremely traumatized they were by the ride when they rolled into the station, but now these girls are shouting in panic to be let out because it’s evident the op was about to send them around again. Slowly, he acknowledges the screaming — still never uttering a single word through all this, by the way — and manually releases the last two rows.
So now the last five rows (four seats per row) are all empty, right? So what does he do? I KNOW what a normal ride op would do at any Six Flags, as I’ve seen it done a million times. He’d call for the station operator to release the gates again to allow the last five rows of riders to board the empty rows. What does this guy do? In full horror of slow motion, he shuffles back to the fifth to last row and slowly, slooooowly, closes the retraints one by one and buckles them up. Slooowly he works through all five rows, twenty seats, and closes the restraints. Then they send off the train with the last five rows empty. Huge groans from the people smashed together waiting in the station.
4. Food. I’ve saved the worst for last and don’t know if I’m up to the task. I’ll concentrate on one incident, and then maybe reference two others. Let’s call them A, B, and C moments.
A. At JB Sports Grill (name is something like that), there is a line that goes through a cattle pen back and forth and then spills out into the midway. I could talk about the lack of control of the line, but let’s just fast forward until, years later, when we finally reach the counter. We finally reach our spot at the cashier, and the employee says nothing. I do her job for her and say hello. I order my food and give her my membership card, mentioning that it has the full dining plan on it. She says that’ll be $7.10. I explain again that I have the full dining plan. She points to the register and adds, “It says $7.10.” I don’t get rude in the slightest or even get a tone that is anything other than friendly, but I say that I’ve used this card at other Six Flags parks and it covers the full meal. She has to go get someone else to help. Long wait. Another employee arrives and after a long time he succeeds in voiding this first charge and doing it again, with no $7.10 involved. Great! Success! What I would find out later is that the “voiding” of the first meal meant that they used up both my lunch and dinner credits at the same time, an argument I’d have to make that evening.
Anyway, order successfully submitted at the time. Cashier says nothing. I volunteer, “Is pickup here or somewhere else?” She responds as if this has never occurred before. “Oh, um, you can just wait right here.” She points about three feet to the side of register, and she takes the order from the next customer. So there we wait. And wait. And wait. After about fifteen minutes, the cashier looks our way and her face very clearly registers, “Oh, yeah! That’s right! Those guys are waiting.” She turns around and checks all the food placed on the counter behind her by the cooks. She goes back to her computer to see what the order was. She returns to the cook counter and gets the attention of a cook. If our original order ever was made it was clearly long gone, and whatever the case she is clearly now placing our order anew or for the first time with the cooks. Another ten minutes go by and again she looks up and registers surprise with a clear “Oh, that’s right! Those guys are still here!” look. Again, she returns to the counter behind her and finds among the items that have been sitting there for a while our food. She hands this to us. No words. “We also had drinks.” “Oh, what were your drinks?” (This forgetting of drinks and then being asked afterward what it was — to which I could have said anything — was repeated for all three meals I had at the park.) Then she hands us empty cups. No words. We take our cups and our food and move down the line to the soda dispenser. Nothing comes out any of the pourers. We move farther down the line to the last soda dispenser. This one has ice, but again no soda. We move halfway back again to the middle of the counter line and there is no sign anywhere or any indication of what to do. Meanwhile, there are dozens of other customers, trapped in this same space between packed line and service counter, all angry and confused, all milling about to try to figure out how to get their food and drink. In the middle of the line, I flag down a passing employee behind the counter and ask how we get the drinks. “I get the drinks,” she says. “How on God’s green Earth is anyone supposed to know that, and why would anyone ever arrange a system that way?!” is what I wanted to say. Instead, I just told her which drinks we’d ordered and she filled our cups. Immediately, a gaggle of empty-cupped orphans who saw us getting liquid amassed around us to try to be next. After what had seemed a year, we made it outside. Of course there were no tables.
Well, that is my most detailed account. I’ll add just give quick details from two other incidents.
B. For dinner we went to Macho Nacho, a fast food vaguely Mexicany chain at most Six Flags. I’ll spare you the story of the similarly lengthy and disorganized line process for this one and fast forward to the moment we reach the cashier. At this time, to the left of us, there is a customer who, understandably, had become sick of the process, but, not understandably, decided to deal with it by becoming some kind of diva tyrant bossing the employees around and really becoming kind of impossible. The young staff were clearly horribly undertrained and had absolutely no idea how to deal with this. First there was the one mentioned earlier who, heading back into the kitchen as the man was berating her, passive-aggressively shouted over her shoulder that she just wished he “would shut the f*ck up!!” This sent the man into paroxysms of performative outrage. Repeatedly shouting what had been said to him, he demanded to see the manager and blah, blah, blah. But this was the amazing part: Every single employee in the place stopped everything they were doing and just stared dumbfounded at the man while he performed (shouted and demanded this and that) for minutes. It went on for minutes. I am standing directly in front of the cashier waiting to order, but she’s just staring off to the side transfixed, as if she’s just witnessed the Second Coming of Jesus. It was so amazing — keep in mind there is a huge mob of irritated people in line waiting to order — that I just had to chuckle a bit. I mean, if I were a jerk it would have been a perfect time to snap my fingers in her face, but I was more filled with amazed curiosity. How long can every employee go on standing stock still and staring, as if they were watching someone perform a fit on reality TV. Finally, I just tried a few hello’s and hi’s, and when she looked my way, asked if I could order. I got my food and left, but my friend was waiting in front of a different cashier, and he told me that a manager came up behind this cashier, put her hands on the young woman’s shoulders, physically pivoting her in the direction of my friend, and said, “This customer is your priority. You have to focus on the customer.” It was almost like a teaching assistant dealing with an autistic child in the classroom. Such a strange thing.
We then moved to the outdoor tables, and it looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned all day. I don’t mean there was a bit of a mess here and there. I mean to sit down and put your food on a table, you’d have to physically move aside all the previous cartons and wrappers and condiments and such. And the trash bins weren’t just overflowing. They were little mountains of trash in a shape suggestive that a bin may be somewhere beneath.
C. The next day I tried the mobile ordering, thinking — in hope more than expectation — that if the system actually worked, maybe I could cut out a lot of the previous day’s nonsense. I picked a restaurant, Johnny Rocket’s, selected the food, entered the dining plan info, and then I had to select the time. It was 11 o’clock and the AVAILABLE (this is key) choices were in fifteen-minute slots, starting at 11. So, 11-11:15, 11:15-11:30, etc. I was on the other side of the park, so I chose 11:45-12:00.
I arrived at the restaurant at 11:40, and it was closed. No one inside. What would have happened if I had selected 11:00, which was showing as available?
By 11:55 I can see the first employees stirring inside. Another family arrives, looking at the order on their phone, but confused to find it closed. At noon, someone briefly opens the door and asks if we are mobile orderers. Yes, we are. So we’re let in. Just me and this one family. And we wait inside. And wait and wait. Meanwhile, people are constantly approaching the door we were let in and finding it locked. Some go away, but many remain, and these are people staring at their phones in disbelief, pointing to their mobile-ordered food and tapping on the glass. They get more and more agitated, but the employees are still just setting the place up and they don’t care about all the irritated confusion going on outside. To ask the obvious question: why have a mobile ordering system geared to times when the restaurant is not going to be ready? That’s just setting up parkgoers for confusion and frustration. And in this case, they’ve ordered their food, but have no idea if they can get it, AND they see just a few customers already in the restaurant for some reason.
Finally, some of the crowd trapped outside notice that some employees are occasionally coming in and out a door hidden at the side, almost at the back. First two teenage boys go around and enter, and then when the crowd sees this, they all rush over and enter. And then non-mobile-orderers also see that the place is apparently accessible, so everyone tries to crowd into the mobile order line, which is clearly on one side of the restaurant, and the walk-in orders is meant to be on the other side. When they finally opened the walk-in side, it created mass chaos with people trying to cross over every which way.
Meanwhile, that one family and I are at the start of the line. There have been cartons of food placed on the counter behind the cashier for about ten minutes, and I say to the family, “I’m pretty sure that’s our food that’s been sitting there all this time.” They immediately reply, “Oh, we KNOW that’s our food — we recognize the order. We’re just wondering how long it’ll take them to notice.” A man behind the counter at this point kind of figured out what we were talking about, turned around, and actually said, “Oh, I didn’t see that was already there. OK. I’m sorry about that! There you go. Oh, did you have a drink? What size was it?” At that point, I was just genuinely pleased to have gotten an apology. I had grown used to almost no speech at all from everyone employed by SFoG.
Phew! Well, you asked for it. That was a few of the incidents that I observed over the day and a half at the park.
