We spend one day a year at the local theme park.  We are pretty lucky to live very close to a really big one so we don’t have the expense of travelling to one.  Kings Island is in our neighborhood and it has some of the most amazing roller coasters in the world  The fall Fear Fest and Halloween festivities are first class.  The live entertainment is top-notch and reason enough to go to the park.  Everything is clean and the landscaping is beautiful.  And, it feels like a place where the customer is incredibly important.  In exactly the same way the mark is incredibly important to the con artist.  The food is ball park high-priced.  The servings are normal sized and the drinks are ridiculous.  A bottle of water from the vending machines that line the miles long turnstiles is four bucks.  A 1/4 pound hot dog is $4.50 and two regular sized slices of pizza –  $6.99. (No, you can’t buy just one.  They are sold two at a time and the computer system the high school kid is running at the register won’t sell you just the one piece.)  A quarter cup of flavor free flash frozen ice cream balls is $5 and there are even rides in the park that require you to pay up more than the $52 it cost you to get past the gate.  Well, $52 plus $12 to park your car and walk to the gate.  Nope, no parking lot tram any more.  You can get the tickets on-line for a discount that slides away as you pay a $5 dollar service fee to print the ticket on your own printer with your own paper and ink.  You can have even more fun in the park with the carnival like arcade games.  You know, like the hard to make free throw at $3 for a single ball?  The football toss through a tire for $3 a throw.  The bowling ball on a ramp game for $3 dollars a try.  You might notice a pattern.  Rides are amazing and lines are up to 2 hours long.  We went to the park today for nine hours and rode 7 rides.  One roller coaster, The Racer is old tech and the lines are short so of the 7 rides 3 of them were trips on The Racer.  So really, 9 hours for 5 different rides, (four coasters and a water ride).  And in that nine hours you have to eat and drink.  You can sit at the ball park and not need to spend the confiscatory prices on the concessions.  It’s a three-hour tour.  Go to the monster park and it is an all day endeavor with no real choice but to succumb to the highway robbery of a $9.99 hamburger and $4 fountain drink.  All I could think of as I pulled out my wallet again and again was how much the folks who run Kings Island must hate their customers.  I watched family after family walk away from paying four bucks for a twenty ounce bottle of Diet Coke shaking their heads in disgust and dealing with disappointed kids.  I watched smart Mom’s keep the water bottle they walked in with and refill them at the water fountains outside the still amazingly free restrooms.  (I know, why give them that idea?)  Kings Island and, I assume the other parks run by their parent company Cedar Fair Entertainment, make me feel like a fool for paying their prices and I hate to look the fool in front of my kids.  So, even though they are right here in the neighborhood, we go less than once a year.  And, if I can find a way to wiggle out of that one I do.  I get that the coasters are world-renowned.  But I can buy 20 tickets to the I-Max for what a day of tramping around their overpriced confines cost and still have enough left over to not look like an idiot to my kids.