“Guess I’m taking a nap for lunch” said the caption on a video going viral this week. It shows an almost unbelievable price for a slice of cheese pizza at a Six Flags park in the U.S.
It’s probably happened to you at some point. You’re enjoying a beautiful sunny day at a theme park, getting thrills on your favorite rides and then you start to get hungry.
Wanting to avoid getting whatever meal you choose all over yourself after the next ride, you probably pick something simple. A hot dog, or a slice of pizza. Then, you look at the price. For TikTok user @deezyrides, that price was $16.99 for a slice.
“Yo, I am starving right now, by $17 for a piece of cheese pizza is absolutely diabolical,” he said in the video filmed at Six Flags Over Georgia in Atlanta, Ga. It was posted Thursday and by Friday afternoon, the post had close to 38,000 likes and around 3,800 comments.
One of the comments said: “Six flags food prices are crazy. They make Disney food prices look reasonable.”
Although the U.S. has been dealing with inflation for some time, this price seems especially high. In fact, the slice price is actually similar to the average price of an entire large pizza in many U.S. states, according to the Slice of the Union Pizza Index. In Georgia, the average price for a large cheese pizza as of February was $18.21. In Texas, it’s $17.12.
In a previous post, deezyrides revealed that he had not been to the Georgia park since 2005, when he wasn’t tall enough to ride any of the rides. According to the park website, tickets for entry start at $59.
“Theme park food is overpriced,” said a 2014 post from Theme Park Insider. “That’s not a secret and the proprietors of theme parks will tell you as much. The logic goes as such: Event pricing is an institution at places of leisure. Paying $10 for a beer at a Dodgers game is as normal as it is to pay $7 for a popcorn at a movie theater and the business owners point at their compatriots as backing for their own pricing. This is a form of institutionalized collusion.”
However, sometimes viral posts do make a difference. For example, Vox reported about a 2021 X (then Twitter) post about airport prices, another common source of complaints.
“In July 2021, one thirsty traveler named Cooper Lund tweeted out an image of an airport bar menu, which, among other things, included an eye-popping $27.85 beer – Sam Adams Summer Ale Draught, to be specific – in LaGuardia’s Terminal C,” said the article. That post sparked an investigation that found that customers had been charged a “totally indefensible” price for beer.
Then, the Port Authority – the agency that oversees LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark Airports in New York and New Jersey – released a 35-page policy guide in March 2022 to crack down on prices. New rules prohibited vendors from charging more than 10% over “street prices.”
Blaise Waguespack, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said that airport businesses, like theme parks and movie theaters, know they have captive consumers.
While Six Flags Over Georgia does include its restaurant list on its website, it does not include prices for the pizza slice.