General Carowinds discussion
By Capler
#108460
Any time you have an event that is heavy teen centric, such as a Halloween event, you are increasing your potential for this sort of thing to happen. Some advocate raising prices, which I don't agree with because it would immediately exclude people of a lower income, gang member or not. So if you want to start excluding people, how about raising the age limit to 21 for the event. i'm sure none of you would advocate that.
Businesses are fully aware of the risk when dealing with teens and those that choose to cater to this crowd are willing to take the risk.

BTW, gang members and many lower income folk don't buy season passes. How can you justify buying a pass for the park for next year, when the light bill has to paid tomorrow? Poor folk typically pay full price, (trust me, it's expensive being poor), use discount coupons, or comp tickets. Season passes are a middle class suburban construct.

Some of the ways parks discourage teens from attending, particularly urban teens, is to not play hip hop music in the park, instead they play country and pop. They also name areas; County Fair and BlueRidge Junction, and theme a ride to Nascar. If you want to discourage certain teens, that is the way to do it.
Last edited by Capler on September 15th, 2019, 6:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.
By HiveDive
#108461
tarheel1231 wrote:The discussion about raising the price is contained to SCarowinds, not the regular price.

My point still stands… If you increase your price significantly for the Scarowinds ticket you are turning away a large portion of your customers. Not to mention Scarowinds only has 5 mazes, raising the prices isn’t going to go down well for a lot of people unless the level of quality goes up.
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By coasterbruh
#108462
Then raise the quality to what it USE to be and charge accordingly. I don't get this "lower income people couldn't come if prices go up". If i'm strugging financially, the last thing i'm thinking of doing is going to a theme park. This is Scarowinds, not the local library.

Capler wrote:Some of the ways parks discourage teens from attending, particularly urban teens, is to not play hip hop music in the park, instead they play country and pop. They also name areas; County Fair and BlueRidge Junction, and theme a ride to Nascar. If you want to discourage certain teens, that is the way to do it.

You can't be serious lol. Do you know how many people have no idea what the ride names are, let alone what the area is called? And it's not about discouraging anyone. It's about pricing yourself to make people understand the value of their dollar, thus hopefully discouraging less bad behavior.

But this topic will forever be debatable will never come to a conclusion without getting all political so i'm gonna drop it.

Ya'll enjoy SCarowinds, and be safe . . .
By Capler
#108463
coasterbruh wrote:Then raise the quality to what it USE to be and charge accordingly. I don't get this "lower income people couldn't come if prices go up". If i'm strugging financially, the last thing i'm thinking of doing is going to a theme park. This is Scarowinds, not the local library.

Capler wrote:Some of the ways parks discourage teens from attending, particularly urban teens, is to not play hip hop music in the park, instead they play country and pop. They also name areas; County Fair and BlueRidge Junction, and theme a ride to Nascar. If you want to discourage certain teens, that is the way to do it.

You can't be serious lol. Do you know how many people have no idea what the ride names are, let alone what the area is called? And it's not about discouraging anyone. It's about pricing yourself to make people understand the value of their dollar, thus hopefully discouraging less bad behavior.

But this topic will forever be debatable will never come to a conclusion without getting all political so i'm gonna drop it.

Ya'll enjoy SCarowinds, and be safe . . .


So you are going to tell me you are not aware that marketing is aimed at specific demographics? Unfortunately some of the information is used to discourage the things that you don't want. If I can be frank with my comments for a second, it's not pretty but it is the reality we live in. Many white people will not frequent a business if there are too many black and brown faces in the place. We are talking theme parks, malls, night clubs....Six Flag Magic Mountain and Six Flags America had reputations as being 'urban parks' and seldom did people have good things to say about them.
It's not right and it's not fair but businesses will sacrifice one group based on a more lucrative group's fears.

Carowinds could easily highlight African American culture in the same way they have done with Appalachia, especially when you consider South Carolina was majority populated with African Americas for most of it's existence. Unfortunately that will not happen at Carowinds anytime soon and it is largely based on fear. If too many black people attend the park, many white families will stop going because they feel unsafe.
By FezzyGamer
#108466
FezzyGamer wrote:[img]...[/img]

Aw man it didn’t show up. Well, there have been threats of another fight next week on social media. Stay safe.
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By tarheel1231
#108467
Capler wrote:Some of the ways parks discourage teens from attending, particularly urban teens, is to not play hip hop music in the park, instead they play country and pop. They also name areas; County Fair and BlueRidge Junction, and theme a ride to Nascar. If you want to discourage certain teens, that is the way to do it.


Capler wrote:So you are going to tell me you are not aware that marketing is aimed at specific demographics? Unfortunately some of the information is used to discourage the things that you don't want. If I can be frank with my comments for a second, it's not pretty but it is the reality we live in. Many white people will not frequent a business if there are too many black and brown faces in the place. We are talking theme parks, malls, night clubs....Six Flag Magic Mountain and Six Flags America had reputations as being 'urban parks' and seldom did people have good things to say about them.
It's not right and it's not fair but businesses will sacrifice one group based on a more lucrative group's fears.

Carowinds could easily highlight African American culture in the same way they have done with Appalachia, especially when you consider South Carolina was majority populated with African Americas for most of it's existence. Unfortunately that will not happen at Carowinds anytime soon and it is largely based on fear. If too many black people attend the park, many white families will stop going because they feel unsafe.


:roll: Way to lump us all into one monolith. I’ll admit my earlier comment about assuming gang members were somehow passholders was stupid, but the issue isn’t black and brown people. The issue, as coasterbruh and others have stated, is that the accessibility of SCarowinds allows some idiots to ignore the price they paid to get in and use it as a venue to fight.

I’m sure there’s steps the park can take to prevent fights, particularly banning people (as Fezzy has pointed out) who threaten to stage fights over social media.
By RollerBee
#108468
I am going to try and fix this statement for you:

“If too many problems happen at the park, many families of any kind will stop going because they feel unsafe.”

I have already stopped attending SCarowinds for a couple reasons.

1) I don’t feel safe at SCarowinds because:
A) The kind of crowd it attracts (ie large groups of teens).
B) The Park is generally crowded during SCarowinds.

2) The event is scary anymore, the park doesn’t do enough to keep the event fresh. The last new maze we got was Depth of Darkness and it feels like it was lazily done, just Defex in reserve.

However I would love to see African American culture highlighted but how would you tie that to the Carolinas?
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By coasterbruh
#108469
A plantation house . . .

:clap: :clap: :clap:
By RollerBee
#108470
coasterbruh wrote:A plantation house . . .

:clap: :clap: :clap:

I walked right into that one....

Originally Carowinds marketed the maingate as a Southern Colonial Mansion but they labeled the area as Plantation Sqaure. I hate to fault them but they could have avoided the maingate becoming known as the “Plantation House” if they had skipped out on basing the stucture off the Gone with the Wind and named the area “Colonial Sqaure”.

Coasterbruh just added another question...

How would tie it in without offending someone?
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By coasterbruh
#108471
Personally I don't know of a way TO do it without offending anyone. Just leave it be. Right now, the way they do it works. Just create the atmosphere and leave any cultural aspect out of it.
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By tarheel1231
#108472
coasterbruh wrote:Personally I don't know of a way TO do it without offending anyone. Just leave it be. Right now, the way they do it works. Just create the atmosphere and leave any cultural aspect out of it.


I feel like some sort of Gullah festival would be a nice way to incorporate African American culture, but even that feels a bit too on-the-nose.

I feel that music would be a good way to introduce parts of it (e.g. Blues, Soul), and there’s tons of food items that could be developed.
By Capler
#108473
coasterbruh wrote:Personally I don't know of a way TO do it without offending anyone. Just leave it be. Right now, the way they do it works. Just create the atmosphere and leave any cultural aspect out of it.


That is what Six Flags does with all of the comic book themes. Busch theme their stuff to different parts of the world and the sea. Paramount moved the park away from that sort of theming, but Cedar Fair has made it a priority. I have no problem with doing that but you have to be inclusive of all cultures in the region. You can't single one out and make it the standard. Carowinds has an opportunity to address this as they continue to re=theme parts of the park. Low Country could be a themed area.
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