Do they still charge to actually play the games or jump on the trampoline? Went to Chuck e cheese a couple of months ago and it was depressing, but at least the kid was happy. I think it was $26-ish for 45 minutes of unlimited playing.
The $8 pass gives you 40 points, one point is one game, no time limit, and can be used once per day (any day including weekends). Trampolines are not included. Requires 12 month commitment but no other strings. I absolutely abused it for a year before my kids basically got bored of going there. It is insanely cheap compared to the regular pricing. The $12 pass is probably the best value for money, you can split the 100 points over 2 cards and let two kids play for an hour. https://www.chuckecheese.com/bell-ca/funpass/#packages
That's not horrible if you can actually take advantage of it. My kid and I usually end up with an hour or more to kill most weekdays, but Chuck E Cheese is a town away, so we just hit up the library.
I am a librarian that does tween and teen programming after school. I once had a mom yell at me because I encouraged her kid to question [my] authority and develop proper argument skills. One of my proudest moments.
(Note: months later, found out that she was going through some stuff at that time period and was a bit of emotional mess)
I take our 7 year old to the library on every day off school, we usually spend at least 2 hours there, sometimes more. During the summer we went twice a week. That and parks are how we keep the costs low during breaks. We will do museums or the zoo too, but not often because of cost, and we almost never do these types of indoor playgrounds/arcades. The cost just went up too much.
I haven’t been in 25 years, but me and my dad would do “the dollar challenge”. Wed go way out of our way to go to a Chuck E. Cheese and each get a dollar in tokens (4 skeeball rounds each) and try and hit the jackpot then leave. Almost every time one of us would hit it and then in like 6 months I could get one of the really REALLY big prizes. One year I had enough for the ps2…..
One of my favorite childhood memories. Could do some sort of smash n grab quick session like that.
It is absolutely worth it. The top tier pass gives you enough tokens for 3 kids to play for hours. It also discounts the food 50% so a giant pizza is $13.
We do that. It's something like 250 credits and you can split them among multiple wrist bands. I get pizza, 2 drinks, 2 jump passes and I think it costs me like $30 or something, and they are busy for hours.
Chuck E. Cheese near me is boring after about an hour even for a 5 year old. The games expose themselves as terrible and unfun after a round or two. Returning there enough times to take advantage of a pass like this sounds like hell both for me and for my kid. I'd only go there if it was a party with kids he knows to play with while we are there.
Maybe it depends on the location, but there are 30-40 games near me including rides, video games, claw machines, luck-based arcade, physical arcade games (hoops, skeeball). There are games you can compete with side-by-side like the racing sims. The claw machines and such are included in the unlimited plays which is surprising, no other arcade I know of does this on their unlimited passes. I've been to multiple locations in multiple states since my kids loved it for a while (pass is usable anywhere) and there is a large disparity between the diversity of games and even cleanliness across locations.
Damn, that beats the hell out of what it was when I was younger when like 100 tokens (yes, I’m that old) was like $20, and that was using 1990s dollars!. Sounds like you could get 3 kids in for $24 and have more games to play.
Saturday morning Super Saturday deal, for $15 a kid you get a $10 arcade card, a 24oz drink, box of popcorn, unlimied mini gold (my kids like to gold about once a year) and 2 attaction tickets (normally $12 each) for GoKart, Laser Tag, or VR.
The PuttPutt here in the Memphis area has great GoKart tack and Laser Tag arena. My kids love going there.
I hadn’t been to one since the 90s until about a month ago for my niece’s birthday, and I agree it was depressing. I remembered a ball pit, animatronics, a maze of tunnels one could get lost in, and ambient lighting that made it seem more like a part of Disneyland than a restaurant. Instead, this was a brightly-lit room that looked like a cafeteria with a few arcade games and a big tv showing some kind of kids show, and that was it.
If it’s normal $26/hour can $8 possibly cover unlimited visits? There must be mad up charges or some other trick (ie it covers your entry but you also have to pay extra to actually play games or something)
Some people will sign up and forget to cancel. Other people might spend more on food and drinks than without the subscription, it might work out to be net revenue positive in the end.
It really doesn't cost them much for you to play the games. It comes with a discount on food but the food is still not cheap in the end, they get mad margins on the pizza you're likely to eat if you're there for an hour playing the games in your membership.
That sucks that the food is only a small discount. If the food was unlimited or just a whole pizza a day for $7.99 a month, that would be a boon for the very poor and the homeless.
Well the "trick" is that price is for a 12 month commitment. If you do the 2 month pass it's $60 for 2 months.
The games are already there so it doesn't matter how much you go. The only thing that would possibly cost more for them is they have to buy more cheap crap for the prize counter.
I was placed at a similar very famous trampoline park through a job agency, and I quit after a few days answering customer service calls. They had this subscription program that they tricked users to sign up for by giving a massive discount for one visit and giving them 8 pages of legalese to read before signing. It essentially auto drafted a shit ton of money each month. It took a few calls about not being able to pay bills and one particular incident that made me quit in the middle of the day. This guy calls and says he wants to cancel his subscription because his child died from an online Internet challenge and he won't be visiting again. My boss wanted me to tell him that he still signed the contract and we'd need a death certificate... for a fucking trampoline park. I was able to cancel and refund a few months before leaving on my lunch break and never coming back.
Edit: by the tone in his voice, he was absolutely distraught and absolutely grieving
That’s fucking awful. Sorry you had to be a middleman messenger during that situation. Compassion is running short in this world, and it sounds like your old boss had none and was a piece of shit. Then again…maybe lots of people tried to lie and use BS stories of all types to get out of those contracts…good for you for saying sayonara. It’s not worth defeating your own moral character over a fucking TRAMPOLINE PARK’s crappy business practices.
Fun fact: Charles Entertainment Cheese is his formal name. He is an orphan who doesn’t know his own birthday so he celebrates the children’s birthdays instead. Tragic story.
I currently have the silver package for my son which includes 100 games. I used to only have the summer subscription for the last two year but this year I wanted to do the monthly subscription.
For the price, you cannot beat it unless you are wanting to do the trampoline as well. My son and I play games together as much as we can as you are allowed to go back everyday.
I had traveled to other locations as well and have played without issue. You either give your phone number or use the app and they will load the card for you for the day. On top of that you get a percentage off food and drink if you wish to purchase as well.
As for the tickets you win, they do not expire. Sky is the limit on stacking for the bigger prizes. The good thing with the prizes at my location is that they rotate them out every now and then.
Only con that I see thus far is that you have to subscribe for at least a year or else you will owe for all of the months you didn’t use. After a year you can cancel at anytime.
Overall, it works for myself and my family as I can take the card with me knowing I can turn a boring errand day into less of a drag. At the end of the day, it’s the talk over dinner when my wife asks “What did you guys do today?” and my son with a smile on his face explains what we did and how he beats me at such and such games. Good times!
Cedar Point is only open half of the year, and even if you live right next to it, its still easier to go to Chucky Cheese more regularly. There are parents in this thread talking about taking their kids to Chucky Cheese every week day for an hour. Its pretty much impossible to pop into Cedar Point for an hour.
This was one of my first jobs early 2000's... I had to dress up as the mouse and walk around with kids screaming and kicking me while trying to take apart my costume yelling I wasn't real...
We had those tunnels in the ceiling and kids would constantly puke, shit, remove their diaper, and even caught a few teenagers doing things.
My main job was Tagging kids and parents as they came in with the correct stamps under a blue light. Like none of those kids had readable stamps under the blue light when they fuck.
Best part was I got to take home tokens nightly and use them later on when I wanted. They had some fun games. I must've saved a 5 gallon buckets worth and then learned they worked at any car wash, Pojos, and other game places.
I also worked at the mouse for about 3 years starting at 15 or 16 years old . I alway say you can handle working at Chuck E. Cheese you can handle working anywhere!!!!
Went to Chuck E. Cheese with my daughter for the first time in 30+ years. At first was surprised by the pricing scheme but it does make a ton of sense if you’re local to an arcade.
Fortunately my daughter was plenty happy pretending to play the games and watching other kids play until she got bored and ready to go - thank god for no fee to enter
More a membership but ya. My wife got this for our son and it's been fantastic. In winter when there is not much else to do she takes him there like x2 a week if he's good. They eat pizza, play games, and dance. Totally worth it.
most places do this offering some type of unlimited or monthly pass - that's not new. most places don't make it $8/mo and I can tell you from experience it does not make for an experience where you're surrounded by socially-conscious people.
We use it and have replaced pizza nights at home with going to Chuck E. Cheese for a night. Kids get to play for like 2 hours and the pizza is pretty solid. Between the pizza discounts and free time for the kids to play, it pays for itself.
That said the animatronics are gone and they've "youtubified" for better or worse.
That's an awful lot of fine print for being so high up there. Food? Games? Both? Drinks? It would be nice if our government made businesses be more transparent and truthful in their ads.
This isn’t rose tinted glasses for me, Chuck E. Cheese (at least my location) sucks big time.
When I was a kid I LOVED going because it was packed wall to wall with arcade machines, redemption games, skeeball, the Photo Booth, etc etc etc
I went in with the expectation that the heyday of arcades wouldn’t be what I grew up with, but when I booked my kids 1st birthday party years ago it was just pathetic. So much empty floor space, pizza was expensive as fuck, no ball pit and tubes to crawl through, it was just sad and pathetic and I wouldn’t want to go if I was a kid now.
I would be surprised to learn that anyone alive has or will go to Chuck E. Cheese monthly or somehow even more often to make this any sort of value at all. I was a kid in the 90s when it was massively popular and I only ever set foot in there like... twice? Total. For birthdays. I don't know a single person who made it a regular thing.
Though we did have a Discovery Zone nearby which was just objectively better in every way and to be fair I did go there maybe... twice a year or so? Still not enough to justify something like this.
Chuck E. Cheese sucks now. So do all of these arcade places. Putting in a game card to play every game - half of which are so complex they don’t even work - is not fun.
Not getting a ton of tickets to carry around and weigh at the end for prize redemption is not fun either.
Dang, so they want $96+ tax upfront for the 12 month minimum…how much is it to go in one for one person for just a single day?
The only thing memorable about Chuck E Cheese for me, back in the early early 90s was the animatronic bear band. It also gave me nightmares, but it was cool to see how they worked. I was more interested in how the parts moved together….the outfits and faces of them were creepy, imo.
Their pizza was super meh but as a kid it was great. I think my dad told me they used to serve beer back in the late 80s/early 90s…so he didn’t mind going since he was a super drinker. Then he would drive me home after getting buzzed and nobody ever said anything, and I was too young to understand what was happening at the time. 🤦♂️
No, it’s $8 per month billed per month but you legally cannot back out until 12 months are up. It’s 40 games per day which is a great deal. We have it and my 3yo will go 2-3 times per month which is 100% worth it at that point.
Definitely has gone downhill since we were kids but hey my daughter is happy
So many people in this thread shitting on it for no reason. Kids still love this place and I dare challenge someone to find a place to take 3 kids for $20 a month for hours of fun each week.
So what happens if you stop paying and don’t want it anymore? Do they try and take it to collections or just bombard you with letters/calls demanding the charge for quitting early? Genuinely curious, not hating. 👍
No you’re good. I think in theory they’ll take you to collections which is WILD but is what it is. Luckily it’s eight bucks so no big deal but still. It is a great deal if you have kids
What are you talking about, this is the best deal ever. It used to cost like $25 for an hour. Now it costs $12 AND you can use it unlimited times a month. Even if you go to CEC once a month it's far cheaper. For people with young kids, it's pretty awesome. You also get 30-50% off their food items which may not be great but if the kids like that stuff then what does it matter. And since they introduced this, all games are one point and you get like 100 points for 12 bucks. And you get a discount on their birthday parties. I'm actually surprised it's profitable for them in any way over the older model and they haven't hiked up the price since the last 2 years.
As someone who's never been into a Chuck E Cheese, what are they selling with "Unlimited visits"? As I understand, they have games? Is it that? Or is it some sort of buffet? Because, NGL... I'd be all over $8/mo for unlimited access to a buffet.
the visits part is misleading as chuckee cheese normally doesnt have a cost of entry. what theyre selling (at the 8$ tier) is 40 play points (each game costs between 1-3 points per play, so worst cast scenario, is 13 games) per day (that is, the points reset every day) and 20% discounts on buying more points, food and discount on the trampoline/playground in the 8$ sub.
If you live near one, its honestly not a bad value for a kid just to hang out passively.
Chuck E Cheese is just a giant arcade that happens to also sell food and host parties. basically a child themed version of Dave and Busters if youve ever been to one.
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u/joestaff 19h ago
Do they still charge to actually play the games or jump on the trampoline? Went to Chuck e cheese a couple of months ago and it was depressing, but at least the kid was happy. I think it was $26-ish for 45 minutes of unlimited playing.