Food Prices... Getting Too high?
Out of the two theme parks i've been to recently(SFNE and Canobie) their is a huge diffrence in price. At Canobie fries may be $3 while at SFNE around $5. So wat are some high and good/low prices you've payed?
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Im the #1 Canobie Lake Park Fan!!!These are my top 3 coasters:
1. S:RoS @ SFNE 2. Yankee Cannonball 3. Cyclone
WDW is actually one of the few parks at which you can eat healthily. If you're limiting yourself to the fast food stands, you're outta luck, but the restaurants lining the World Showcase and the Hotel Restaurants have a very good selection of healthy fare.
When I used to make my annual 2 week pilgramage to WDW, I would make all my reservations ahead of time, plan out my days so I could be in the right parks at the right times, and read up on the restaurants cuisine ahead of time.
If you're just going for a day trip to a local park, there is absolutely no reason to eat there if you don't want to. Bring your own cooler and stick it in a locker for a dollar. If you bring two cokes, a sandwich, a ziploc bag of chips, and a piece of fruit, you've probably spent a total of $3, including the locker.
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Proud CB club member
I don't think prices are too high. Again you have to go the GP (I hate the term, yes) vs enthusiast route.
For the GP, trips to parks are few and far between and have more of a vacation feel to them. The idea is to drop money & have a good time and "escape" for a while. That's pretty much what a vacation is.
For enthusiasts, trips to parks are pretty frequent. The prices get old fast. I've only been to Dorney 4 times this year and already have spent more than I care to mention on food and drinks.
I still don't mind though. I'm there to get away and have fun. If that means paying too much for food and drink, then I'm ok with it.
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www.coasterimage.com
Serious school cafeteria food at serious TGIFriday prices.
At BGW, be careful where you eat, because some of the food there is the same old crap everywhere else, institutional quality. You can literally smell the differences in their food establishments. Don't eat pizza over by AC, go to da Festaus. Don't eat fries & nuggets, look for food in the village near the gate where they're roasting them babies;)!
But as far as prices getting out of hand, I have some understanding on it. Why are sodas $3 out of the machines? Not to rip us off, not to make us mad, but to make sure there are sodas around for people. If they were $1, they would be empty all day, & you'd have to dodge the Pepsi man as he makes his way around the park fillin' machines all day long.
If they sold food cheap, like a 2.99 value meal, they'd sell too much. There wouldn't be anything to eat when you got hungry.
The prices are evil, always have been, but it's difficult to support & supply these places once the people are there in numbers.
When I was a child, my mother used to make me frozen sandwhiches when we went places. I don't know HOW she did it, but they ALWAYS tasted fresh. It takes some experimenting, but it works sometimes, especially if you don't have your cooler.
Y'know what I found odd at CP last season? At that big bank of Pepsi machines in the MF line, the price was 50 cents less than at the little cart that was dispensing the exact same bottles less than 10 feet away. People were still buying them there, too. (Also they made me finish my drink before entering the line, but apparently have no problem with me buying another one once I'm in said line.)
Anywho: Kennywood 2002 prices: Chicken strips + Patch fries + Pepsi at Small Fry in Lost Kennywood : $6.20, bottles of water/Pepsi/Code Red I think are $2.
Also, for the first time this year, Kennywood is offering refills on souvenir mugs. $2.50 to buy it, $1.50 to refill.
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"When I was growing up, we were taught something called manners. You'd understand that if you weren't such an idiot." - Jack Handey
*** This post was edited by kpjb on 5/23/2002. ***
This brings me back. Good old supply and demand curves.
Parks charge as much as they do, because they can. You have a bunch of people, who are as good as locked in the place for the day (plenty of people here do duck down the the shopping centre down the road for lunch, though). Either they eat, or they don't, more eat than don't though. So much so, that they are making more off the overpriced food with slightly less people buying it, than if they charged less and had more buying it.
This is called relatively inelastic, almost getting to the stage where it is perfectly inelastic. To an extent, people pay what you tell them to.
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So what if the best coaster in Australia is a second hand Arrow?
The situation goes beyond supply and demand. If you want more affordable food/drinks, be prepared to may more for admission. Do the math. CP gets approx 3 million visits a season. 2.5 million of those visits are at ticket price (maybe discounted) and the other half are season pass holder. (Note: I am not saying there are 500,000 season pass holders, just that they account for 500,000 visits.) 2.5 million visits at $40 a pop, is $100 million. Sounds like quite a bit. Not at all. Consider, payroll, facilities, capital improvements, expendables, utilities, marketing, insurance, etc...
These numbers are pure speculation, and based upon general business and common sence. (Please keep this in mind before arguing that CP had 3.1243 million vistors in 2001 and has 28,876 pass holders, etc.)
Sure, a park can only charge $1.50 for a soda, but be prepared to pay $65 to get in, and forget season passes. It's like the movies. You want a fancy new digital projectors, stadium seats, etc., why do you think popcorn is $5 a bag. Theaters only get a small percentage of the ticket price.
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