Maybe if you (and others) dined at Great Adventure more (which should be more likely if the restaurants aren't filthy/dated/ugly, the food is good, and the service is efficient) the park's maintenance budget would have been large enough to support the continued operation of Ka.
All of these things are connected. Successful parks in the year 2025 make an astronomical proportion of their profits on food and beverage. Whether you will buy the food or not doesn't matter. You will benefit greatly from the increased profits the additional F&B sales that result from these renovations deliver to the park overall and they will result in a measurable improvement to your experience even if you never once taste a morsel of food.
Great Adventure, like most every other legacy Six Flags property, has allowed their F&B program to stagnate and rot in place. The decade+ of neglect likely showed little impact early on (as those profits were extracted from the division for other projects) but I am confident that the harm is clearly evident on the park's balance sheets now. There will be a painful transition period where a lot of Cap-Ex has to be spent to bring these facilities up to par to get them back to the efficient, money printing machines they should be. Those investments will pay dividends for many, many years to come though.
The issue is that previous managements were all cheapskates who had forgor basic maintenance which gave them short term gains at the expense of long term loss.
Neither you or I will benefit from increased food sales at any park. Only the shareholders benefit from it, unless one is a shareholder of the company that owns the park in question. Increased cash inflows go into executive pay, bonuses, and maybe stock dividends. If they see a major uptick in revenue despite liquidating a sizeable portion of fixed assets, why would they allocate more Capex when revenue is already up without doing so?
Moreover, this is a case of voting with your wallet. Rewarding management for massive removals while trying to distract by overglorifying microfixies like slapping paint on buildings with increased revenue does not benefit me. Why would anyone want to reward behavior they find objectionable? If they install high quality replacement rides then I might Increase my expenditures, not for a fresh coat of paint or foodstuff commodities. Hopefully with all the painting they can also spring for some weed killer to get rid of the poison ivy overgrowth around the park.
This is the same tactics previous management's did. Remove rides but make a big deal performing minute changes like painting and other basics they should have been performing anyway. The previous management also made a big deal about improving food service. They boasted they had tried all sorts of chicken tenders and pizzas from several suppliers which gave us a big laugh at the former GAH forums over the inanity of it.
Dude, come on... the park is finally paying attention to its appearance. While rides are obviously important, a guest wants to feel like they are getting a good value for their money in other ways too, food and appearance are a big part of that.
Dude, I heard this same exact spiel from white knights defending the several previous owners of Six Flags for over 20 years. Surely it will be different for the umpteenth time, right? Man I said a pretty mild objection and you guys get hyper over it. Time to get some thicker skin.
Personally I find El Toro too rough to ride more than twice anymore. Hopefully the retrack will smooth it out though the 3 year pieceal job isn't ideal. Also, don't simp for a soulless corporation like Colliwood's cringy video advocates for. If your gonna simp, at least simp for an actual person, preferably a hotty. But you really shouldn't go though life simping.
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