… You are scratched, limping, sweating and out of oxygen, head spinning with scavengers clinging to merry-go-rounds, beeping, buzzing, a steady stream of rapping rats with guitars, the shuffle of children searching for their next twenty-second fix.
No, you are not having hallucinations of a post-apocalyptic kiddie crackhouse. You are at Chuck E. Cheese—specifically, the one in Manchester, Connecticut.
I have but one piece of advice. Don’t go there.
It is not the spacious, magic-filled wonderland we all knew and loved from our birthday parties as kids. Gone are the amusement park rides, bowling allies, ball pits (which afforded us the ecstatic pleasure of rolling about in a hideous strain of bacteria), video game arcades, children with manners, and space to freely move your arms and legs. It is now situated in a cramped warehouse on Buckland Street, with each game or ride situated so close you can reach out and touch the next one.
Pictured above are Tyler and his best friend from school, Shane, standing before the “Ticket Muncher”—a machine that gobbles up rolls of tickets and spits out a receipt. With every count to a hundred, their eyes bulged with dollar signs. “One hundred….” they shouted gleefully. “…two hundred….three hundred…THREE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN!” they yelled, then propped the receipt in my hand as though they had just uncovered the solution to my endangered 401K plan. They scrambled to the prize station, visions of Lego kits, scooters and motorized monster trucks in their heads.
When they got there, they spied a slinky for 7,500 tokens. There was also a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee for 5,000. For the girls, a generic Barbie doll for 6,000 tokens. For 347 tokens, they discovered they could buy three-inch plastic telescope, which fell apart seconds after it was in their hands.
It is a sad day when inflation hits Chuck E. Cheese.
I retract my earlier statement.
Go to Chuck E. Cheese. There is no better way to instill your children with a crash course in Econ 101, psychology of the masses and survival of the fittest.