Has anyone been to Chuck E. Cheese?

[Anonymous]

I am actually serious. I am not afraid of covid through touch. I would imagine CEC would be totally dead. Is this true?

I know Dave and busters used to be empty in the mornings pre covid.

I am really that desperate right now.

[Anonymous]

Shut up

[Anonymous]

I wouldn't even go there pre-COVID!

[Anonymous]

At some point briefly, they were open in Montgomery County and we went. Are they open in other areas? I will have to look up and if not too far, we would go. I am not a germaphobe though and have no fear of COVID.

[Anonymous]

Just no. I’ve been to many indoor places even restaurants but just no. It’s awful in normal times. Find somewhere else.

I got pink eye as an adult after going to a party there.

[Anonymous]

I worked at Chuck E. Cheese in a state far away from here when I was a teenager. They were huge on disinfecting tables, being careful about food prep, etc. There were only a few ticket generating machines (skee ball is actually the only one I remember). Most kids would sit and play one or two arcade games for an hour just feeding quarters in. Also, lots of kids would sit for a long period of time and watch the animatronic band play different songs - I remember sitting 45 minutes or so just listening to songs as a kid. We also had a staff of about 10 people at any given time so plenty of people to clean up. I hadn't set foot in a Chuck E. Cheese for about 17 years or so by the time I went to the one up in Rockville and GOOD LORD has it gone down hill. Not that it was ever amazing, but I couldn't count more than 3 staff members in the whole place, who you never saw cleaning anything. There are now about 30 different ticket games so kids run around and get their filthy hands all over everything and there's no way someone can keep 30 machines with that much traffic clean. The germ spreading is also worse because the animatronic band is gone so there is nothing to hold kids' attention for more than 2 minutes at a time. The tables were filthy and even the "clean" one we eventually found had an invisible layer of pizza slime/grease thinly coating the top of it. The place is an absolute pig sty.

[Anonymous]

I would be kind of okay with it if it wasn’t crowded but that isn’t something you can ever be sure of. You might have a big crowd coming in after you get there and kids are generally bad at social distancing even when they aren’t in the middle of a game-playing frenzy.

[Anonymous]

It sucks, the games are gambling

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn't even go there pre-COVID!

This.
We went to a party at a Chuck E Cheese last year, just before the pandemic shut everything down. It was a disorganized mess, and the place was absolutely filthy. Never again.

[Anonymous]

Chuck E Cheese was disgusting pre-Covid.

[Anonymous]

On purpose, not to be polite?

[Anonymous]

I’m sad because I just learned that the animatronics are gone! I remember taking my kids there in the mid-nineties, and it was such fun. Google says that the animatronics were removed in late 2019. We used to do what the PP described - watch the shows, maybe play a couple of games, and eat pizza. Guess that’s something I won’t be doing with the grandchildren.

(Regardless, it’s never something I’d do in a pandemic.)

[Anonymous]

So no one has actually been to CEC?

[Anonymous]

Spiraling into CEC research, I found this amazing article:
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/an-oral-history-of-those-creepy-ass-chuck-e-cheese-robots

Excerpt from a survivor of the pizza wars of the 80s:

“We were fighting Chuck E. Cheese for five years, and we knew we were better than Chuck E. Cheese. They were crap, and we were great, that’s what we believed. We were rivals. We don’t want to buy them out, we want to kill them! If they’re going to go out of business, let them go out of business. Don’t prop them up. Kill the rat! Let me plunge the sword through Chuck E. Cheese’s heart!”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn't even go there pre-COVID!

Hahaha! Yes, I agree!