THERE'S NO ESCAPING OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

A post reacting to widespread closures at Red Lobster offered an economics lesson suitable for the start of the semester.  "Recall, years ago, our coverage about the Six Flags amusement parks being a long-term real estate speculation? Opportunity cost sure got the better of many a small amusement park or kiddieland over the past quarter century, didn't it?"

On a February, 2013 visit to O Scale West, a swap meet soon to be displaced thanks to the construction of Levi's Stadium across the stroad from the headquarters hotel, I suggested the former Marriott's Great America at Santa Clara might not be long for this world.

Silicon Valley is far enough north that the amusement park closes for the winter, or for what passes as winter (the conditions were warmish for late January, although the high temperature in Chicago on 29 January exceeded the high temperature for Santa Clara.) The beginning of football season overlaps with the end of the summer high season for amusement parks. Along Great America Boulevard, office towers encroach on the perimeter of the park. At some time, the management is going to remember what opportunity cost is.

They did.

The park’s lease expires in 2028, and the land it sits on, across the freeway from Nvidia’s spaceship-esque headquarters, would bring in more tax revenue if it were used for basically anything else. After 50 years in operation, it is expected to close next year.

Josh Code, writing in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, uses its impending closure to contemplate the Deeper Implications.

The death of California’s Great America is partly about the economics of the amusement park business itself; partly about the way many Americans now feel too ashamed or demoralized to celebrate their country; and more broadly about the shift in so much of modern leisure from the physical to the digital.

So in anticipation of the closure of Great America, I returned to my childhood theme park for the first time in 10 years. I paid $60 for admission and $39 for parking to see exactly what Silicon Valley would be losing—which turned out to be more than just nine roller coasters, nine water slides, and a handful of Snoopy-themed attractions.

If you pay attention, you can make out the vestiges of a theme park built in celebration of America: a 1950s-style retro diner that serves corn dogs and milkshakes; a spinning, red, white, and blue ride called the Liberty Twirler; and the faint sounds of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” playing over speakers in the queueing area of Patriot, a 91-foot-high, bright blue America-themed roller coaster.

But the park is showing its age. “I feel like everything’s run-down now and they don’t really put the effort into making it like that kind of a more memorable experience,” Brian Halstead, 42, told me while we waited in line for RailBlazer, a bright orange roller coaster towering over a faux desert oasis. He was visiting with his two kids, Isabel and Masa. I had just watched him call out several teenagers cutting in line, a behavior that he said was “unheard of” when he was a kid. “People would call you out and get in fights with you.”

Halstead grew up traveling to the park from Santa Cruz to watch the fireworks every year on July 4. The place used to have all the Looney Tunes characters in costume, posing for pictures with guests. Patriotic shows and musicals, which took place several times a day, are now few and far between. These days, the kids are on their phones, and they have no shame about cutting in line. “Make Great America great again,” he jokes.

My own experience felt a little lackluster now, too. My ride on Demon, once my favorite roller coaster in the park, entailed a lot more headbanging than I remembered. The funnel cake I waited a half hour in line for was—much to my chagrin—not fresh out of the fryer but rather premade, sitting under a heat lamp like a pet lizard. And when I asked a park employee for a paper map, she told me they no longer print them and advised me to download the app for Six Flags, which operates the park.

I was able to visit that park during the Summer 2010 O Scale National Convention, which was also at the Westin across the stroad from what we knew was going to be the stadium site.  It was not that busy a day, and, rehabilitation of my elbow or not, I did get some riding in on the roller coasters.  The combination of third world bad manners and cell phones that he complains of had not yet become common.  The residual Warner Brothers characters are a holdover from Marriott days, as Marriott and Warner Brothers collaborated on the theming.

Thereafter, I fear he goes overboard on those Deeper Implications.

Social media algorithms shifted our idea of leisure from visiting places we want to experience to visiting places we feel we ought to experience. For the same reason that people in New York City, where I now live, regularly wait in hours-long lines to try the next viral frozen yogurt, American’s theme park dreams are converging on just two locales: Orlando and Southern California.

Somewhere along the line, Great America fell out of step with the culture. “When we built the park, it was a celebration of America; that was the whole idea,” said John Probst, who worked for J.W. Marriott when the hospitality mogul opened the park in 1976. “People today aren’t as concerned with America and America’s values as they were back in the ’70s or ’80s.”

That might be true of coastal people who fancy themselves sophisticated, or perhaps are hoping for that fifteen second viral moment.  Normals have no such illusions.

Probst, 80, told me California’s Great America’s sister park, Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, which is still open, was much more serious about its America 250 celebration this year: “They had a parade with floats. They had lasers and fireworks and drones, a big production, and I think this reflects the difference between the Midwestern attitude toward America and maybe the more liberal attitude in California.”

That might be trying too hard.  Six Flags in Gurnee is far enough from Chicago to be an inconvenient commute, and Illinois is a tax hell for business, thus the warehouses and data centers that might otherwise be looking at land conveniently close to railroads and power stations are setting up on the good side of the Cheddar Curtain.

There is one change the closure of Santa Clara brings that will not be welcome by the local labor force.  Apparently many of the staff are local high schoolers.  In Gurnee, the last time I was there, some years ago (the joys of aging bones) many of the staff, as has been the case at Wisconsin Dells, are on temporary visas from former Warsaw Pact countries.