Which is fair to me. I think clearly SEAS is trying to do something with their money that they are cutting everything this much and they are being incredibly coy about it.
Unfortunately I think the major (not the only) reason is more executive bonus related and/or shareholder. You shouldn't ignore your executives and your shareholders but it also isn't all about them. It really seems to me that SEAS is only thinking very short term and little about long term.
I've mentioned this on our podcast before but I worked at Pizza Hut through the years that they went from being
the place you went for pizza to being just a mediocre option. While I was shift level management I was actually a go-to manager who covered multiple stores as things got worse and worse and BGW is just reminding me of that time at Pizza Hut. It becomes a focus on bottom line which leads to a hyper focus on the bottom line but that hyper focus then causes a performance drop which freaks out those watching the bottom line which leads to another area of cuts which leads to more performance drop, which leads to blame and pressure put on the bottom of the food chain, which repeats over and over until what once was is gone and unable to be easily regained. I remember even in that period when there was a stretch where corporate went through and started doing major renovations to back of house sections of nearly all the stores in our region and we were shocked and excited until we finally found out that the reason for all of it was what would do the most damage to the brand -- they switched fresh dough to all frozen dough. After that there wasn't only a service issue because of lack of labor hours to spend but the quality dropped..... it wasn't long after that that we started seeing most of the dine-in stores close, the company selling off corporate stores to franchises, and the rapid downward spiral. Obviously it's not a direct parallel but it really just reminds me of that scenario.
(On the first part - as someone that goes solo to parks all the time I have low expectations anyways)
My expectations usually fall in line with price.... my biggest problem with BGW was paying
far more money than anywhere else and not having anything that really justified that cost. A few years back I could justify it but it's hard to do so now. KD (well, CF in general) is middle of the road..... I always had decent expectations but could tolerate some crap..... SF was always the one that I just expected it and rolled with the punches because it was cheap enough that I didn't care -- but, of course, all that is changing now and the next couple of years are looking very different.
I find your point of the treatment more important than the pay conversation for some of the reasons I stated. Though we’ve discussed in the PGA about a “day of reconnoning” where The customer service industry (which amusement parks fall under) is going to crater as we already have many more jobs available than people even applying.
Yup.... and the reason why they don't get the applications is because of pay and, especially, the lack of benefits and fair treatment. If I could afford to work at a park I'd be making that happen right now.... even just as a ride operator -- but people have to pay their bills.