Killing The British Theme Park Industry
Pros
- You get to work in some of the former brilliant UK theme parks, what little design or features left from their great years is always engaging and inspiring. - Often friendly team members who are can pull together and get things done, support can be found in most departments.
Cons
- Ridiculous underfunding of all departments. This is a billion pound company that wants to build from scratch 4 new Legolands in new continents, yet they don't want to fund departments properly. - Terrible, crass new developments. Always demolishing classic, well designed parts of their parks to be replaced with generic, tacky tourist fodder. Always extremely rushed or cheaply put together behind the scenes, New attractions are only as good as they want guests to see them as, anyone who actually has any awareness of good attractions isn't cared about. Any staff who have to fight to keep these poorly built newer attractions running aren't cared for, unlike the older rides where systems are properly built and maintainable. -Constant PR lies and hyperbole used to get people in the parks, once they're in there's no presentation standard or nice atmosphere anymore. False advetising claims, CGI imagery used constantly instead of anything that looks like the actual parks and rides. - Rides constantly have most their effects unfixed for years, anyone from the technical departments who try to fix things out of goodwill just ends up having their work reversed or having to do it with no budget and no help. - Underpaying of all staff at all levels. People with great enthusiasm and energy lose their steam and realise they're being taken for granted by managements higher up. ESSENTIAL work regularly relies on staff 'going the extra mile' as they say it, more often than not permanent staff have no choice but to stay long after their shifts with no overtime pay. - Constantly very disheartening to see so many good-willed people with passion underpaid and get the energy kicked out of them with constant, unreasonable hours. - Salaries would calculate to being less by the hour than what minimum wage, hourly-paid staff get for the same period. Luckily I was hourly paid so got this benefit, once I left my full-time position got cut and talk of making it fixed salary instead next year, to save money! - Company cares so much for their online image, that they task their PR teams to stalk certain people on social media and call them in for disciplinary if they so much as like a post that is against the company branding. Disciplinaries are held for anyone who questions the norm. - Fake, useless schemes like "Spark An Idea" make sure any staff ideas Merlin can profit from get used by the company without any care for whoever came up with the idea. Only frivolous ideas that can be done cheaply get any attention. Usually results in stupid decisions by people who don't know what a real non-Merlin theme park is like. - Company has a monopoly on UK theme parks and promotes a contrived Merlin 'culture' and sets their own standards to keep staff brainwashed, so that they don't realise how poor quality their company standards are, how underpaid staff are to run their attractions on the ground and how proper theme parks don't have to do things 'The Merlin Way' to be successful. - They always paint Disney as the villain with internal staff training and inductions, always indoctrinating staff to believe the contrived Merlin Way. Meanwhile they produce poor work, unentertaining ideas and don't employ real industry professionals or designers, who end up going out of work, because they know they can benefit from the naive enthusiasm of so many well-meaning younger staff or people just out of university. - Selfish inexperienced but good-talking people always succeed over hard working knowledgeable/talented people. Bum licking and party going with managers always gets you to the top. Being an arrogant, smarmy, personality-less suit always gets people the top jobs. - High pressure and blame-pointing towards minimum wage staff. The responsibilities and pressure from department managers (post-Smiler accident) for long, tough, repetitive and often exhausting work should be higher than £6.50 an hour. - No one stays for long because team morale is so low in the big frontline departments, managers are often fed up young adults who treat their front-liners as asky, featurelss, disposable staff.
