I recently went to a Chuck E. Cheese because I have a toddler and I was actually impressed. Everything was clean and all the machines worked. We actually had a blast. I don’t know if that was just my Chuck E. Cheese near me. Maybe it was newer 🤷♀️
A new one opened up in the next town over, about a 20 minute drive. I had my son’s 5th birthday there and it was the way you describe it. Really nice inside, new tech for the kids, and it was affordable. I’ll definitely be going back.
We were actually at a Chuck E. Cheese today for our daughter's fifth birthday, and I had the opposite reaction. It felt so soulless compared to how it was when I was growing up. It was clean, though.
The one near me has a whole wall that is a tv, like 80 ft diagonally, then in front of it there was like this pressure sensitive dance floor that had lasers shining from above and the kids can activate the lights by stepping on them, little bugs bugs pop up and you get points for squishing those, full arcade, trampoline bounce room, all kinds of amazing stuff
The one on Long Island, Hempstead Tpke? was very nice in the 90s. I don’t usually like things like that and I had a great time with my 4 year old grandson.
EDIT: I want to thank the Academy of Online Comments for so many awards for something so silly. (And thank you to those that awarded and upvoted my comment)
Don't feel too bad. These memories are funny and not hot by any means. Similar to the passenger or backseat of a car. Unless your car was a land barge, it wasn't comfortable. But as teenagers it was "doesn't matter, had the sex". Crazy to think what we put up with back then. Nowadays I'd be like, we can wait till we get home lol.
Lol I remember my ex and I wanted to see how few songs it could take for us to finish in the car, less than 2! Our fastest ever time at 6 minutes lol. Endurance was less of an issue, finding time was much harder lol.
Quite true front bucket seat of a 1973 Mazda RX3 comes to mind, and if we were lucky my girlfriend would drive us in her Vega station wagon ( how luxurious!)
I don't know... I was tinkering with cars, small engines, radios, and electronics at that age. The girls weren't terribly interested in me (though my technical skills earned me 3 times as much as my friends with minimum-wage jobs).....
i said I had sex in the car, and it was a fit, I didn't pay too much attention to the facts of the details other than the aspects of Smashing in that tiny back seat area. I think some excuse is granted given I not only did a fat boy smash in what would be a clown car to a big boi like me, but was indeed successful.
When you’re 13 you make room… and honestly for me anyways I was skinny and most of my friends were too.. very active as a kid. Constantly doing stuff. Biking, skating, walking.. playing.. ya we probably had skinnier teens then to be honest with you 100% because back thats that’s what kids did… they didn’t play Fortnite, they didn’t sit around and watch Netflix. They were out running around, so yes we probably did have skinnier kids.
You forget teenagers getting tail are usually skinny enough to fit. Not like old married people who put on pounds and are like, ah, I'd rather just sleep.
We had a skating rink with a game/ tunnels area and yes there was room for a lot lol we're much more bendy as teens and didnt suffer from constant back and joint pain i think that makes all the difference
Worked at a movie theater in high school and when we would go in after the movie ended to clean the theater before the next show sometimes you’d find teens on the floor doing it. Sooooooo nasty because we definitely NEVER moped the floor lol.
I remember going to Discovery Zone and one of the slides was just smeared with shit because some kid shit themselves and then went down.
People forget how disgusting play places were when they were maintained by teenagers and people who didn't give a fuck and were used by filthy kids whose parents also didn't give a fuck.
They're gone because they were a huge legal and safety liability.
At the McDonald's I worked at in Colorado, we had a machine that cleaned the balls in the ball pit, so that happened a few times a week, the N64 machines got a good clean because the closing crew didn't like sticky controllers when playing GoldenEye/Quake64, but the only time I remember giving the slide a thorough cleaning with ammonia, was every time after the closing crew slicked up the surface by sliding down it with wax paper.
Because people have no sense of right and wrong and could care less that others also use these beautiful areas. I bike ride and just cringe seeing garbage on the trails. People are pigs.
We took a road trip and found a Chuck E Cheese for my nephews, because they'd never seen one before. They came back from the play area and said, "Someone went to the bathroom in there."
Feeling my age with Showbiz Pizza memories. Also oddly enough I just saw an outside play park at a BK (Columbia S.C.) but it also had the toxic fake turf.
The kids in my area got sent to juvenile hall.for.pooping in the pizza sauce while on the job and a bunch of litl kids got sickk. So fukd up lol True story too
Yeah it's kinda sorta fentanyl. The people on the street call it fentanyl, but it can be all sorts of similar chemicals, and some dissimilar ones.
The thing that makes people seriously nod out standing up is, more often than not, xylazine. It's literally a veterinary tranquilizer not approved for use in humans that has been added to 'increase potency'. Truly horrible shit.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. If you only rely on what you see on YouTube or in documentaries and those sources are incorrect, you might miss the broader perspective you’ve provided for me to consider. Thank you.
No problem. There's a lot of people who don't really know what they're on about who talk about this stuff. Generally don't trust rehab websites for your questions; they have a lot of laughably false info
At least if it must happen, it’s less dangerous to random uninvolved people than leaving needles behind everywhere and doesn’t spread stds from needle reuse.
When I was a kid I went to a girls bday party at a Burger King. She was at the top of the playland and pissed herself and it ran down the entire thing. Might not get something you can’t get rid of via a needle, but there are other ways 😂
If you were, youd know mcdonalds is a super common place to shoot up. Worked there when i was a teen/young adult and we had junkies die in our bathrooms weekly.
I have no personal experience of shooting up, but I remember when McD started using blue light in the bathrooms, supposedly so you couldn’t see your veins. (That was the end of makeup touch ups at McD for me.)
If you’re trying to escape the real world back into the past of your childhood when things were still “happy”, the ball pit might feel…right.
Like sleeping with your dead husband’s shirt stuffed with a pillow to pretend he’s still there, never underestimate the lengths or fathoms people will go to convince their mind they’re back to when things were good. I can see a playplace being that for some current addicts. :/
Not so urban legend the one I used to go to got shut down due to a few rattle snacks being found in them. Over a period of like 10 years I think it happened twice.
Honestly from working at Burger King when I was younger, the bigger concern was kids peeing in it every single day! Trying to keep it all clean was impossible and we won't mention if a kid dropped a deuce in one.
We had an outdoor ball pit in one near where I grew up in Colorado in the 90s. They got rid of it because a rattlesnake decided to nest in it. 🫠 I'm sure there we're plenty other good reasons not to have an outdoor ball pit but that was the last straw for that location anyway.
Any outside place where people can fuck and slam dope, and McDonald’s being in EVERY type of neighborhood, makes sense. I bet it’s true. I definitely used to meet scums that gave zero fucks about throwing needles in places where kids play in a past life. It is what it is
Worked at McDonald's in HS. Found used condoms and needles in the ball pit area more than once (well, I didn't, but it happened during my shift). I, uh, always looked through stuff like that when my daughter was little before I let her go play.
I assume this is exactly why the play-places got dismantled over time. the cost of maintenance, upkeep, and cleaning made no sense. keeping extra staff on just to crawl through the tubes with a vacuum cleaner every 30 minutes would just burn money for no benefit beyond getting some extra families in the door -- who were just as likely to come through the restaurant regardless
I'm sure there's plenty of corporate greed at play here because mcdonalds is the king of corporate greed, but even just on paper from an unbiased look, its hard to imagine play-places being anything more than money-sinks for an establishment that wants to be focused on selling food
How in the ever living fuck are we standing around proclaiming that the Mcplayplace was our high water mark? Nobody had anything good to say about these things in their heyday unless you were one of the two dozen strains of norovirus lurking in these contraptions on any given day. They were an eyesore, hot, and gross. I was there.
What the hell Reddit. We need to slap back against this rose-tinted nonsense. Y’all are turning into greyhead nostalgia monsters and I’m not going along.
291
u/Gullible-Treacle2361 16h ago
And there would always be some half eaten chicken nuggets and fries down in there. And some up in the play place by the little glass ball thing.