Mark W. Shead

If you aren’t familiar with Silver Dollar City, it is a 1800′s themed amusement park build on top of Marvel Cave in Branson, MO. They have a mixture of rides and period crafts and artists. This week I was noticing how they manage the lines at their rides.

We were there during the off season so the park wasn’t overly full. However, the lines still seemed to take a very long time. Waits of 20 minutes to an hour were common. I notice that many rides were only operating at 1/4 capacity. 75% of the cars were sitting idle.

I realized that Silver Dollar City must know exactly how few rides they can run before people start getting upset. The fewer cars they run the fewer people they need to operate them, so it saves them a little money. I’m guessing they know exactly how poor of an experience they can give people before it starts hurting their profits.

On the other hand, they have people paid to walk around and encourage people in line to squish together–so the line doesn’t look so long. Of course the line is still just as long. If those workers were deployed running the rides the lines might actually be shorter.

Now perhaps I just happened to hit all the rides at exactly the wrong time, but I know there were a great number of people in the same situation I was in. The extra cost of adequately staffing the rides would have been minimal and would have created a much better customer experience.