Is it just me, or are the seasonal amusement parks not nearly as busy as they used to be? As a young adult in the 90s/early 2000s, the parks seemed to be way more crowded and have a bigger cultural relevance back then. Growing up in the midwest the three biggest parks were Cedar Point, SFGAm, and PKI, and all three parks were opening huge new (frequently record breaking) coasters on a regular basis. The parks had huge crowds and long lines almost every day.
With the failures of many big record breaking coasters, and the huge maintenance and operations cost of these parks, its not really sustainable to be building coasters of the scale and frequency that they used to. I believe as a result teenagers/young adults have lost interest in seasonal parks as their biggest coasters are the same ones as 20+ years ago. TTD is still the tallest coaster at CP (opened 23 years ago), Raging Bull is still the biggest coaster at SFGAm (opened 27 years ago), and while Orion is the biggest coaster at KI, its about the same size as Millennium Force which is not far away (opened in 26 years ago). People my age had huge new coasters to look forward to every few years, whereas it seems like teenagers nowadays don't have much to be excited about, and as a result are losing interest. If you were to tell me 20 years ago that 20 years from now, in DejaVu's spot, there will be a new coaster that was about the same height and more boring, it would have disappointed me.
Meanwhile parks like Disney and Universal have been investing big $ into highly themed immersive experiences and have been killing it from a business perspective. The parks in the northern half of the country seem to have peaked attendance wise in the early 2000s.
There could be many things playing into this: is the K-shape economy also a factor? Parks that cater to the "middle class" (whatever that means now) are getting poorer, while parks that cater to the upper class are doing really well? How much is the mismanagement of Six Flags providing a poor experience for such a long time playing into this? Does the low birth rate factor in?
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