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Hand stamps


gigacoaster2k
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Well, on that we can agree...I wouldn't either! :)

And I'm sorry I thought you were! :)

Terpy, who often finds life to be a great adventure (and who just yesterday stamped more than one hand in yet a different park...)

Cedar Fair has a ton of work to do. I'm afraid if I was a PR person for them I'd have to quit because I couldn't defend them honestly.

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I agree with terpy on this. I got my stamp and left the park to put on a little more sunscreen at my car. Magically, the stamp disapppeared instantly. I told the lady at the gate what happened and she let me in because she remembered me coming out of the park...it had been about 5 mins or so.

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For people with Season Passes, could they just skip the hand stamp and leave the park, then re-enter using their pass (as if it were the first time they were entering the park that day)? Or, is there a limit to the number of times your pass can be scanned for a day?

Seems like it would be less of a pain, as opposed to dealing with ink that seems to wash away too easily, or rub off on shirt sleeves and stain clothing.

I re-entered with my season pass in the same day and it created a miniature conflict. nothing large. they dont let you do that though

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Also, they do not change the wrist bands color or position for Pay One Price and Drink All Day for $9.99....

ETA: About the wristband thing.

The park I grew up had wristbands for rides ($1 to get in, $14 for a wristband to ride), they changed the color and pattern (hatch) of the wristband everyday, one year I collected all over my wristband, around 30, and I only had one repeat. It is not hard to change the bands up.

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I'm wondering what the "other reasons" were. I bet they involve nickels...

I'm not sure. The ink they had last year was expired so I don't know what the deal was with that. I am thinking that had a few years too much ink.

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The park will never accept a ticket that has been stamped for re-entry. When the entry ticket is first scaned, it records the time, date and other things when used and is voided for further use. If that was the case, any person can always pick up a discard ticket and claim it is theirs. All guests should always save their ticket stubs if there is any questions regarding re-entry. Also as stated, all season passes are only valid for one single day use. On the back of the pass, it is included along with all the other legal jumbo. Season pass holders must still have their hands stamped for re-entry. I also will not go into other details regarding the issue.

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For some one with a pass, it is for the most part a minor issue. In this economy, it could play out to be a disaster for a family of 4 paying regular gate. My experiences have been very good with this issue. Two years ago, we left to go swimming at a friends house. Before we left the park, I talked to GR, the lady took our pass information so we would not have to explain any thing. When we returned, we were lucky enough to talk to the same lady and she let us pass without any issue. I am in agreement with Terpy on this one, (imagine that) the park needs to make it easer on not just the guest but the employees who have to deal with the public. If that means spending a couple of extra nickels for better ink, then so be it.

(Good topic giga, I like discussions like this. Some times small topics like this one can make or break a family vacation.)

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Oh, by the way, those new hand dryers in the bathrooms suck. I've seen a lot of people not be able to figure them out, and if you do, people like me with glasses, you end up getting the water all over them. The bathrooms that still have paper towels in them, it takes forever to get enough to do the job. Hopefully after tomorrow, I won't have to worry about the splashing on the glasses as I'm getting contacts.

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A thought I had is that, by and large, people are honest. While the handstamping needs some "tweakiing" most people who are trying to gain readmittance to the park do have passes or bought a ticket that day. However, those few bad apples that try to circumvent the system ruin it for all the people who are playing by the rules and parks have to find ways to make people behave.

Sigh.

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They were using a gold-green colored stamp yesterday. My wife almost washed hers off with hand sanitizer but noticed before it was too late. I miss the stamps from last season that you passed under the light..they lasted longer so you didn`t have to be so careful with your hands while gone.

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Oh, by the way, those new hand dryers in the bathrooms suck. I've seen a lot of people not be able to figure them out, and if you do, people like me with glasses, you end up getting the water all over them. The bathrooms that still have paper towels in them, it takes forever to get enough to do the job. Hopefully after tomorrow, I won't have to worry about the splashing on the glasses as I'm getting contacts.

I like the new dryers, I don’t wear my glasses in the park so I don’t know about that issue. You don't have to touch anything and your hands are dry when you are done. People just have to actually read the directions when you come up to it. There is even a picture.

This is no different than when they put the auto flushers on the toilets and people were looking around for the flush handle, it just takes getting used to.

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First, some background on where I'm coming from in my response. I worked in Admissions for 10 years, 9 of those years in various management positions in the department. The last 5 of those years, I was in charge of ordering all supplies for the department, including the re-entry ink.

The re-entry ink we used when I was there was not cheap. You would be astonished at how much one bottle was. We constantly reminded our associates to not saturate the ink pad. This ink was pretty difficult to come off. The best thing to use to get it off was rubbing alcohol. Sometimes sunscreen would take it off, but that was EXTREMELY rare.

Once, in an attempt to save money in our budget, we tried a cheaper blacklight-reactive ink. The problem with this one was it had a high ethyl alcohol content, which led to two problems. It evaporated on the ink pad very quickly, and it ate away at the adhesive that held the face of the handstamp onto the handle. We quickly switched back to the more expensive ink which had worked excellently for us for years.

The blacklight lamps we had while I was there were pretty old. They worked great, but we had one break on us once and there was pretty much no repairing it. We still had two lamps, so we took out our spare to replace the one that had broken. For several reasons, I was tasked with finding new blacklights. A lot of what was available at the time did not work anywhere near as well as the ones we had already, but we did have a few handheld blacklights to use as well if we ever needed them (which we very seldom did).

I won't go into why season passes can only be used once. There are good reasons for this, but like Terpy said, the less said the better. There were also ways to tell if a handstamp was fraudulent, but I won't go into those details either except to say that we did catch a good number of attempts. We would not stamp tickets. If someone requested it, we would stamp somewhere else (within reason), usually the inside of the forearm. Violakat and I and others were just talking about that this past weekend, how at CP they're very strict about where they would stamp someone. This may have spread down to KI, but I cannot say for sure. Every once in a great while, someone would be allergic to the ink we used. I can count on one hand the number of these cases I saw in my 10 years in the department. When that situation did arise, we would work with the guest to ensure they would have no problems re-entering the park.

Why they made the switch this year I can't say, simply because I don't know. I highly doubt that it's just because it's better for the environment. Like many decisions made by any company, I suspect it involves counting nickels, but I cannot say for sure.

On Friday I had my hand stamped at the park. I presented my left hand since that was the side closest to the person stamping. She told me she needed to stamp my right hand, and I muttered that it didn't matter what hand she stamped. If they're doing different hands on different days, this now makes sense to me. When I washed my hands outside the park I was very careful to avoid getting the stamp wet because I had heard from several people it rubs/washes off easliy. But the GP wouldn't know this, and they shouldn't have to be careful. Other parks, such as KI did in the past, use ink that does not wash off as easily as this stuff KI uses this year. When I got home Friday night it took a very minimal amount of effort to wash off the stamp, and it should have been a lot harder than what it was. Hopefully KI makes a switch or they'll be facing quite a few re-entry problems this year.

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Did a little research...

At riskreactor.com:

$20 for a one-ounce bottle

$60 for a one-pint bottle ($3.75 an ounce)

$499 for a one-gallon bottle (approximately $3.89 an ounce)

If those prices are anywhere near what KI paid for the ink, I can understand their decision to switch...

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In response about where they stamp - the inside of my forearms are very sensitive and I have an allergic reaction to a lot of inks. Permanent markers are a big one (I can't even have that on the backs of my hands) and the blacklight reactive ink is another. I can have it on the back of my hands with minimal reaction, but if it's put on the inside of my arms I will develop a nasty looking itchy rash very quickly. I did not react to the orange ink being used on Friday, most regular water-based stamp inks are ok so long as they are on the back of my hand rather than the inside of my arm.

Cedar Point was stamping the inside of your forearm last year, and only once did I have an issue with them refusing to stamp my hand instead. That was at the Magnum gate, since we were going to Soak City. After staunchly refusing to give her my forearm, she did stamp the back of my hand instead but was obviously not happy about it. Any other time, all I had to say was "I'm allergic to the ink" and they'd immediately offer another option. They offered to stamp my ticket once but I was using my season pass and said it's ok on the back of my hand.

I always find it ironic what I discover I'm allergic to. I can roll around in poison ivy all day without getting so much as a single itchy bump, but put permanent marker or lavender-scented soap on my hands and I have a mini-disaster!

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^Okay, apparently I had it backwards in my last post. I thought I remembered you saying it was a problem most of the time, but if it was just one then I guess that's not so bad.

I was able to locate online the company we used to order from. The list price on a 1 pint bottle of ink on their website is $29.70. I was thinking it was about $25 when I used to buy it, so this seems about right. It's been a few years since I worked in Admissions, so I don't remember exactly how long a bottle would last, or how many bottles we went through in a week/month/year (there's other things that have since become more important to me than remembering that :lol:). As long as the workers didn't saturate the ink pad, a bottle could last for awhile, but a lot of it had to do with the actual pad itself.

We had this round ink pad, about an inch tall, that was used for years and years. It was looking pretty nasty, particularly around the edges, so I had to try to find a pad to replace it (and to use when we needed more stamping locations). I could find no other ink pad that worked as well as the one we had. The ink pads they make nowadays are generally flat and rectangular. These pads wouldn't hold the ink as well as our old one. They would dry out faster, and you'd have to use more ink. We ended up cleaning the old pad and continued using that as our main one.

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^Okay, apparently I had it backwards in my last post. I thought I remembered you saying it was a problem most of the time, but if it was just one then I guess that's not so bad.

KI is the one that's a jerk about it. Cedar Point is really good about it. Last year there was an issue with KI. They tried to stamp the inside of my arm last year a couple times and usually weren't very nice or understanding about it.

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...I always find it ironic what I discover I'm allergic to. I can roll around in poison ivy all day without getting so much as a single itchy bump, but...

Beware...one can be immune to poison ivy for years and years and years, then one day....

Terpy...don't ask me who I know this!

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...I always find it ironic what I discover I'm allergic to. I can roll around in poison ivy all day without getting so much as a single itchy bump, but...

Beware...one can be immune to poison ivy for years and years and years, then one day....

Terpy...don't ask me who I know this!

Better than the way my dad found out he was highly allergic to it .... it involved a bonfire and a bathtub of chamomile.

My mom isn't allergic to it either. She discovered this once when yanking up weeds as a teenager. Her mom said "you know that's poison ivy, right?" and she hadn't reacted to it at all. Just because I know I've come in contact with it and not reacted to it doesn't mean I don't go out of my way to avoid it anyway. My brother inherited my dad's allergy to it - he just has to look at it and he breaks out.

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...I always find it ironic what I discover I'm allergic to. I can roll around in poison ivy all day without getting so much as a single itchy bump, but...

Beware...one can be immune to poison ivy for years and years and years, then one day....

Terpy...don't ask me who I know this!

Don't tell me about poison ivy. I remember once I was hiking through the Kings Island grounds in the late 60's and caught a bad case of poison ivy. I will not mention the part of my body that I had the misfortune of getting it on! It was plain murder suffering from it for a week. :wacko:

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