Cedar Point Announces Fast Lane On Facebook

Vater said:
I suppose peeing could be considered a fun activity in the right setting. Also, it makes the sentence stand on its own without the need for additional context (i.e. "could go any day I wanted").

:)

Now that you finally got your bran muffin, that sentence doesn't apply to you anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jh6wnmRbvQ

^For Vater - not a rick-roll.....promise!

Technically, Andy, I never did get the muffin. But point taken.

I have been to Cedar Point on days when the crowds are light, and you can't get any better than that. No wait rides on corkscrew, Gemini, Iron Dragon and Mean Streak. Maybe 15 minutes for Raptor, Mantis, and Magnum. The only rides that did have long lines that day were M-Force at 45 minutes, and Disaster Transport at a half hour. Thought there was quite a long wait for Mine Ride, which was only running one train for some odd reason, So I skipped that.

I also rode both sides of Power Tower in under 15 minutes. So, I was able to ride almost every ride in the park a least 2 times, with a few marathon rides on Raptor before the park closed. That kind of day at the Point is very rare, so when it happens on a beautiful sunny day, you go where in the heck is everyone? If it wasn't for being with my brother, who spent a good portion of the day suffering from Mean Streak's Wrath, the day could have been even better. But, I was quite happy.

Have also been there on a dead day, with a friend who likes to drag his feet, and not go on any ride with a wait of more than 10 minutes. He would rather spend the whole day walking through every single store in the park, even though they all sell the same crap!!! So, needless to say, I don't bring him along anymore. I would rather go by myself.

I actually have more fun when I go alone, because the only person that can bitch about wanting to leave is me! And, I stay until they kick me out! Unless it's Michigan's Adventure, then I go when I start feeling the sunburn kicking in. Then I've had enough.

Darned Michigan's Adventure and their stupid sunburn. They need to do something about that. People would stay longer and spend more money if they would fix their sunburn problem. I totally hate that park. ;)

Hey LostKause;

It might interest you to know that they once gave out little tubes of sunscreen to park guests in the park, as there is little or no shade, except for a stretch just behind the log flume, between it and ST's entrance. The rest of the park is pretty much wide open. I am a fair skinned red head, so, when I say I leave when I feel the burn, that usually means I am lobster red, by the time I walk out the gate.

When it's 90 degrees in other parts of the state it can be up to 100 or more on MA's concrete midways. They are trying to bring back the shade, but, it would be nice if they hadn't bull-dozed it in the first place. Of course that's not Cedar Fair's fault, the former owners are the ones who turned this once beautiful wooded area into bare fields.

But, I do notice one thing that did leave with all the trees. There is certainly a huge lack of bugs. When it was wooded, there were misquito's and bugs everywhere. But, they still have the Bees, and I hate them darn things. If I get stung by one, I swell up like a balloon. And, I know what people who read my posts are thinking.

"I'd pay $10 bucks just to see that one time! Oh man he got stung! and He's swelling up! Go find some more bees! The mean stingy kind!

I hate it when amusement parks don't give out free sunscreen, especially when they don't have any shade trees. Why don't they do something about that? I mean, when I get a sunburn at Michigan's Adventure, because of my fair complexion, it's totally their fault. I hate that park.

You have no idea what I am thinking.

Timber-Rider said:
I am a fair skinned red head

Ah, a ginger! That explains everything... ;)

Lima News columnist expects Rich "Uncle" Pennybags to be typical Fast Lane user. :)

"You're almost to the front of the line, after two hours in the hot sun, and a fellow who looks vaguely like the guy from the Monopoly game wheels up and steps in front of you. You get to explain to your kids that, while they did indeed follow the rules and do everything right, certain people in this world are able to skip the hassles and you are not those people."

You get to explain to your kids that, while they did indeed follow the rules and do everything right, certain people in this world are able to skip the hassles and you are not those people."

Amend that with "this time" or "in this case" and I hope it's a lesson my kids learn. I don't see the problem.

Here's where I had a whole tirade about the juvenile idea of fair and how it's how you keep 5 year old idiot kids in line and how you realize the myth that is fair as you grow up the same way you realize Santa isn't real as you get older...

...then I read the article.

The dude is operating on on the level of a kindergartener and says as much. And this...

That feeling, that sense of “not fair,” is what a growing number of people are feeling in this country. It may be naïve, it may be childish, but it's real and it's boiling over. And if the line-cutters of the world don't figure it out soon, they're going to face a roller-coaster of a different sort.

...is about the scariest thing I've ever read.

I'm starting to belive it's not stupidity that's our biggest threat in the world, it's this state of arrested development that everyone seems to readily accept where adults have the impulse control and thought processes of children.

And more to the debate of this sort of service, the author has the same misguided perception as most haters:

...or if you are one of the so-called 99 percent, but not feeling particularly offended, it's hard to explain why some people are. Selling my seat at Cedar Point explains it to me.

Except it wasn't your seat. You were standing in line for a seat handout...waiting for a chance to scramble for the unclaimed, the leftovers, the available. You never bought a seat. Under the new rules, you paid for a chance to accept unbought seats as they become available.

I still don't know how we got to the point where we resent people for what they have rather than trying to better ourselves so we can have it too.

"Gimme!" hardly seems like an ethos that's going to get any of us anywhere.

I don't understand it, either, but "resenting the haves" is a mentality that has existed forever.

Yeah, to a degree I suppose it has.

But the tone of it has changed from "I wish I had that" to "He shouldn't be allowed to have that" and that's nuts to me.

Even scarier is this article's closer of "He shouldn't be allowed to have that, I'm pissed and pretty soon I'm going to do something about it."

If you haven't dispelled your kid's mind of the notion that life is fair by the time he/she is old enough to be knowingly waiting in lines at an amusement park, you have failed as a parent.

I can't even tell you how much of this I've seen as a coach. I coach competitive volleyball, at the level where you don't get play time just because. Parents don't get that. They have no idea how to set realistic expectations. I had one guy who had his daughter brainwashed into thinking she'd play D1 ball on a full scholarship. She was 5'5". Needless to say, she was pretty crushed by her senior year when the offers never came.

If you haven't dispelled your kid's mind of the notion that life is fair by the time he/she is old enough to be knowingly waiting in lines at an amusement park, you have failed as a parent.

This. Exactly. From about the time my kids were old enough to speak, we've had the Noble Family Facts. Fact #1 is: "Life is not fair."

Lord Gonchar said:
But the tone of it has changed from "I wish I had that" to "He shouldn't be allowed to have that" and that's nuts to me.

But here is where I think he is right. The parks should not be offering something that alienates the have-nots. Not everyone can have that line-free experience. It is priced as such, and is the only way that it can work. If everyone could afford it, then it wouldn't be in demand. Someone has to lose out, because it is offered.

Why have a line at all if all non-line-cutters are paying for is the chance to just maybe ride the rides after the people who have more get their rides. This whole front-of-the-line access thing is the real madness. That's what nuts to me.

I have to buy into it if I want to keep people from cutting in front of me. It kind of makes me feel like a dick when I use it too. Guilt-ridden, I sometimes heavy-heartedly mouth "I'm sorry" to the poor sunburned children and their unwashed parents who are next in line as I take the seat that they would have had, while I cut in front of them for the second or third time in the last ten minutes. I suspect that they cry a little inside every time someone cuts the line, because they realize that this, the only amusement park trip they will be able to afford to take this summer, is the way their entire life will go. If only daddy wasn't a failure at life and made more money for his family, he could afford not to stand by and let some rich guy take his and his family's seat.

Perhaps it is a good life lesson, and maybe it will entice them to try to better themselves, but if everyone got a better life, who would serve me my cheeseburgers or ring me up for my new iMac at Best Buy? At the park, there would also be no low-wage-earning lowlifes to check my lapbars or scoop me my ice cream. We need people in the world to slave for us. We can't live our fabulous lives without them being willing to work for crappy pay, and wait in the stand-by line.

I would probably go as far as saying that if someone is having a hard time affording a park trip, why should they even choose to go? They should just stay home and play a board game that they bought at a yard sale or somersault down a hill or something. I mean, an extra $50 is really not that much for a line-cutters privilege. It's their own stupid fault for not making enough to pay for it. They do it to themselves. I almost don't give a crap about other human beings at this point. People are stupid.

LOL I have lost faith in humanity because of this crap.

I've said before that I don't have a moral issue with these kind of systems, my objections (both in principal and working knowledge) are purely on the operational side. And looking forward a bit, I don't like the projection I'm seeing starting to build with the ever-growing use of FOL/virtual-queue systems and how the individual systems get even more inclusive/exclusive (depending on how you look at it) every few years across the industry. Particularly with Disney's NexGen initiative is where I see the most/easiest opportunity to take a gigantic leap forward from what we have today to only scheduled riders, and I'm not sure I'm ok with that, knowing the "scheduled opportunities" would more than likely be on top of a standard admission charge that wouldn't be getting lower, at any park.

EDIT: I know others have said they could see the industry going back to something like a ticket system like the "old days," but this is likely more over the top than imagined with that comparison. In reality, I really don't think it's over the top if you really look at what Disney is (planning on) doing, what has been happening with the growth of Q-Bots/etc., and everything else going on in the industry.

You sort of touch on something that I think is overlooked or missed completely.

We were all born into and grew up in a mostly pay-one-price, ride-all-day world as far as amusement parks are concerned. It's simply a business model. One that happens to be 'normal' to us because it's widespread and familiar.

It seems it may not be the best busines model any more. At least more and more parks think so.

The aversion seems to have more to do with changing paradigms and the inability to understand the bigger picture than anything.

Yes, I get that for a long time now parks charged one price at the door and we all stood around in lines and waited to ride. But that's changing. There'll be a time when we talk about POP as the "old days" too.

I say this a lot but think about it. If you're 16 or 17-ish, you probably don't remember a time when there wasn't FastPass at Disney World. Heck, if you're 12, 13, 14 your whole life has included Q-bot at your local Six Flags for all intents and purposes.

It's here. It's done.

We can be the old curmedgeon complaining to everyone who will listen about how the 'old days' were so much better or we can roll with and accept change. For better and for worse. Seems silly and unproductive to wonk about it.

The game - the business model - is evolving.

I remember the "old days" at Magic Kingdom, where my dad nearly ripped out his hair trying to figure out how many damn tickets to buy for mom and his three sons every ride we queued up for. No thanks. I'll take a Qbot, please.

Lord Gonchar said:

I still don't know how we got to the point where we resent people for what they have rather than trying to better ourselves so we can have it too.

For as long as there's been societies structured around money, there's always been an us and them (great song by the way) mentality to some extent. I think historically it becomes more prevalent when the "have nots" see little to no opportunities to better themselves, which I think is largely what we're seeing now.

The pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality, while it means well, has become a little bit more of a fantasy in recent years. The number of people who have done everything right only to have the rug swept out from under them is staggering. They see the jobs they were qualified for vanishing or going overseas, and prohibitive educational costs prevent them from having a meaningful avenue for starting fresh. Lots of the people who are fortunate enough to still have decent jobs have seen their pay frozen or shrunk while all their other costs continue to increase. They're being told they have to sacrifice while people at the top collect bigger and bigger paydays and bonuses. To me, it's easy to see why someone who's been through that would be resentful. Even more so if they've been paying attention to politics and Wall Street.

Anyway, that's my long winded answer. I do believe that ultimately the FOL access will generally be an accepted thing, if not at first, over time. It'll probably alienate some guests while at the same time making more money for the park, so it is a win from a business standpoint. I'm still personally not a huge fan of it, but I'll ultimately reserve judgement until I see how it all gets implemented. I really want to believe it'll be minimally invasive to those in the "standby" line, but I've seen and heard of too many poor setups, KI's included, to conclude anything just yet.