By a lot of accounts, the home opening series at The Diamond was successful. The home team took three of four games, we all loved the cup holders and individual seats in the lower levels, and that mascot of ours is positively relentless. Not to mention that it just feels good to have baseball back in our city after a drought that felt excruciatingly long. Unfortunately, the return of pro baseball to Richmond brought along its own excruciatingly long waits: at the concession lines.
Even with the great overall atmosphere at the park, the great baseball, and the death-defying antics of the supernaturally energetic and excitable Nutzy, the one thing everyone's mentioned when I've talked to them about their first visit to The Diamond is the long wait for ballpark food. My own party skipped supper to make the 6:35pm start of Saturday’s game, figuring ballpark food and beer would be a treat. However, we quickly realized people around us needed several innings of time to return with air-conditioned room temperature Bud Lights and naked hot dogs, and the only vendors we saw were hawking $5 cotton candy, hardly a solution for famished grown-ups. We wound up leaving the park before the game ended and cooking pork chops at home. At 9:30pm. No way is this what the team’s front office had in mind.
People are paying their way into this park to watch baseball, and it's hugely frustrating for fans to miss a lot of baseball just to keep from being thirsty and hungry. Boulevardizen suggests pregaming, but I'd think the front office would like to improve matters at the park to the point where fans won't have to either eat beforehand or bring along a DLW (Designated Line-Waiter) to catch the baseball they want to see. They've told the RTD they're aware it's bogus, and they're working on it, which is a relief.
If I may, though, here are my suggestions for getting this under control so I never have to bust out a skillet at home after an abbreviated Saturday trip to the ballpark again:
photo: RW PhotoBug
More vendors in the aisles with more products. In our lower level 3rd base side section on Saturday, we didn't see a single vendor until the 5th inning, and our excitement at seeing a person selling things we could eat coming down the stairs was quickly deflated when we saw she only had cotton candy, the least food-like non-souvenir item I can imagine.
Being a long-haul sport, the baseball park experience has evolved to maximize fan time with their eyes on the game by sending concessions out into the stands. Hawkers obviously can't carry a large array of items, but they form an important stopgap between trips back into the dank concourses to buy more substantial food and drink.
The team says 15 vendors were walking about on Thursday. Let's have more of those on big attendance nights, and let's arm them with things people want: hot dogs and beer are an excellent start.
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More stands, fewer options. This is a tall order for the physical structure of The Diamond, but any more spots where things can be quickly distributed and take the pressure off the full-service concession areas with the full ballpark menu would be extremely welcome.
There was a couple near us Saturday that was loading up on nuts because that was the only food line that wasn't completely impenetrable. When orders are easier to fill, they get taken care of more quickly. Let's see if we can't have more things like the Beer Express lines and the nut stands to connect fans with food in the concourses more efficiently.
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Quicker, more novel ways to pay. Cash handling and card authorizations can take a serious bite into the time workers have to fill orders. Group packages include chances to purchase "Acorn Dollars," a kind of Diamond-only currency that fans can use at concession outlets and the team store. Could it improve transaction time if fans could pay in advance for a package of tickets that were directly exchangeable one-to-one for certain popular items?
Here I'm thinking that, if you gave me the opportunity, I would happily buy a $20 single game lower level ticket that included the price of an undiscounted beer and hot dog. I would also definitely take advantage of a program that sold packages of tickets for stadium items at a slight discount, say $55 for 10 bottle beers or $75 for 10 drafts (a regular price bottled Budweiser is $6, a big draft is $8).
There's no change or receipting at the time of the transaction with such a scheme, and fans would be able to get their payment out of the way and out of their head before the game even started rather than constantly waiting for the credit card machines to grind through authorizations across the ether. You've built in incentive for package buyers to come back to the park again and use their tickets, and the club scores bonus revenue if people forget to cash in all the tickets they've bought. Good deal, no?
Can we order delivery? A promotional game for Ledo Pizza at Saturday's game actually got me wondering about this. The way the game worked was, they pulled pairs of kids out of the stands and had each pair represent a side of the park, either 1st Base or 3rd Base. They got one of the kids dizzy and had him try to toss frisbees into a pizza box held by his partner. The one that caught the most frisbees won pizza delivery for their side of the park.
As hungry as we were at this point, I don't think anything has ever sounded more delicious in my life. I watched the kids toss frisbees with an unreasonable degree of urgency, thinking "c'mon, c'mon, please let it be us, there's no food and we want to eat, pizza PLEEEASE." Which makes me wonder, if we can get pizza delivered to our houses by making phone calls, couldn't we use our phones in the stands to call in orders for seat delivery?
I don't know if there's any precedent for that, but it would be an awesome perk the team could charge serious premiums to provide. Heck, while I'm dreaming, give Pizza Hut the concession and let people use their awesome iPhone app to get pies to hungry fans.
I'm really thrilled as a fan that the masses are coming to The Diamond again, but to keep them coming back, the experience at concessions needs to be as smooth and friendly as it possibly can be at our aging park. I know a lot of you made it out this weekend -- what else would you do to fix the food problems at the park?
Squirrels addressing long concession lines [Richmond Times-Dispatch]
A Squirrel's Tale of a Line! [Boulevardizen]
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