In response to my super lengthy complaint letter to Six Flags Magic Mountain, I received the following letter from the park’s Senior Guest Relations Supervisor:
Dear Kevin,
Thank you for taking the time to forward your comments about the Ride Lockers and our Loose Article Policy.
Six Flags has identified several rides at each park where riders bringing loose articles onto the ride platform was slowing down the dispatch times significantly and making the ride wait times longer. At some of these rides, we have installed short-term lockers for the storage of articles. In an effort to increase capacity and shorten wait times, we are not allowing any items that can not be secured in a pocket to be brought onto the ride dock of these rides. Riders may choose to rent a locker, to leave the items with a non-rider, or place the items in their personal vehicle. We have tried to communicate this message to our Guests with signage, personnel stationed at the entrance to the rides, as well as updated text in the Park Map & Guide, and on our website.
Your letter gave us very valuable insight to your experience at the park regarding this policy. I want to assure you that I have forwarded your letter to our Senior Park Managment.
We hope you understand our only intent here is to minimize wait times for everyone. Again, we thank you for your comments, and hope to see you in one of our Park’s again soon. If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me directly.
Sincerely,
Mr. B., Six Flags Magic Mountain Guest Relations
I do appreciate that Mr. B. took the time to write me back, but his letter reads more like an automated form letter than a thoughtful reply. Forgive my cynicism, but I’m not convinced that Six Flags’ main concern is “wait times”. If that were truly the only motivation for these temporary-use lockers, then why not make them free? Aside from that, I reject the premise that these lockers actually make the lines move faster. These locker checkpoints cause plenty of delay all on their own. Just because the bottleneck occurs somewhere other than the boarding platform, that doesn’t mean the line delay has magically disappeared.
Mr. B. also failed to address my complaint about the abusive manner in which the corporate Loose Articles Policy was being enforced. Was it absolutely necessary, for example, for the employee working on the Scream ride to throw away my souvenir cup? I guess corporate policy mandates that all employees act like absolute dicks, right?
I should also point out that some friends of mine recently visited Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California. The locker policy is being strictly enforced there as well, which means that this bullshit is not exclusive to just the Valencia branch.
I’m done with Six Flags. I encourage everybody who reads this to think twice before patronizing your local Six Flags park. Every theme park shamelessly gouges you, but Six Flags is willing to stoop lower than most others out there. When your company values quick, ill-gotten revenue over customer satisfaction, then you don’t understand the first thing about making money, and you don’t deserve to stay in business. That’s not to say that I expect Six Flags to miss me very much, but I assure you the feeling is mutual.
Someone, sadly I forgot who, told me that Six Flags was on the verge of going bankrupt until it recently underwent a change in management. This new owner is probably trying to dig his company out of the financial difficulties but is failing to see the long-term. Yeah, you can gouge your patrons now and make money, but each year less and less people are going to come back next year and the year after that. Sadly, if this new owner isn’t too wise, it might take him years to figure this out and these policies wont change until then. I’m not sure if he will be able to save the park by that point because although it might be hard to fix financial problems with company, I’m sure its infinitely harder to fix a bad reputation.
Automated responses back are the worst. It’s like they take a few responses and paste them here and there added with one legit line from them. Blockbuster does that junk all the time to me.
Yeah, it sounded like an auto-response to me, too. Why does Conrado love to hate Blockbuster? And I laughed at the Porky Pig picture at the top.
Kevin,
I finally got around to reading your complaint, their response, and your reply to their response. This will probably be a unpopular comment but I’ll risk publishing it anyway.
The policy does make the line move faster for people that don’t have souvenirs cups or items requiring use of a locker.
Also, if the lockers were free, then you may see people complain about their lack of availability due to higher demand. An economic analysis would show that the demand for temporary lockers is elastic. i.e demand will increase as prices go down and vice versa.
All that said, I do agree that the enforcement of the policy was unacceptable and Mr B’s response failed address that part of the complaint. I would follow up with the BBB, I wrote a complaint to the BBB about a situation with the parking management at work and received good results.
I see what you’re saying Lee. One thing that I didn’t address in the letter is that people with bags were harassed just as much as people holding souvenir cups. That is to say, the employees were hassling women holding purses, and anybody wearing a backpack. Every third person was asked to step aside and to stow away some kind of loose article. The bottlenecks at the locker areas were ridiculously bad.
I do recognize that the lockers could potentially speed up the lines with the enforcement of some clever policies. Unfortunately, none of those clever policies were in effect when I visited Magic Mountain that day. As far as I’m concerned, Six Flags is more interested in nickel and diming people instead of speeding up the lines.
My comment wasn’t to marginalize the people who had souvenirs cups. In fact I feel like people with souvenir cups on a hot day should be given more consideration than people with purses/backpacks. The backpacks/purses can be left in the car or day locker, but not being able drink fluids while in line on a hot day is something I would complain about too.
The crew should have done a better job communicating and enforcing the policy. However, these are hired grunts with no customer service skills getting minimum wage. They may not have the intelligence to field questions, follow up questions, and counter arguments. Someone like you or Diana can probably talk circles around these guys and get them in more trouble(say something they can’t back out of). That’s why they are trained to have only 2 responses: “it’s corporate policy” or “it’s for your own protection” Maybe it would be better to send them out with T-shirts that read “I’m grunt#1. I’m paid to enforce the loose article policy that I don’t understand. Please let me do my job.”
Lee what is with your avatar? Its ridiculous!
apparently so is mine . . .
Nice read (your letter AND the response)!
Having just visiting Magic Mountain and had a terrible experience, I figured I would come online and see if others had the same issues I did. (We arrived when the gates opened and left when the park closed; During this time, we made it on 4 of the 18 rollers coasters, as everything had a queue over an hour. The coasters we did make it on we waited a combined 6 hours on… That’s a total of 6 hours standing around doing nothing. And the park didn’t even seem all that busy. Add to that the 20 minute lines in just about every restaurant, and 5-10 minute waits in some of the bathrooms).
But you’re reason is quite different. We were able to place our items on the side of the platform, thankfully. They even had bins on a few of the rides to hold our belongings. Just thought you should know! (Still wouldn’t recommend attending, though)