Do they serve alcohol at Chuck E Cheese? How about crazy? A friend of mine went to central PA for work and thought everybody looked inbred. Could my friend's opinion be a factor here?

yes they do serve at Chuck E cheese! well the one in canton MI does. 4 beers on tap. lmao.

The chuck e cheese out here in Milwaukee are GHETTO. I went with a friend to take his kids on the weekend and there where multiple women there dressed like it was a night club with ultra short skirts and revealing tops. The next time for his kids birthdays we went to a better side of town's chuck e cheese with the same result. The floors were littered with cake,wings and pizza and the Pizzas my friend pre-ordered for his booked party took a hour to make, they were trying to kick him out the place before the pizzas even hit the table.
Not to mention they had their liquor license taken away because of the amounts of fights. They really need to make a dress code and hire more help. If I had kids we would NOT go there.

Time for an onsite substation. Isn't this where the Gosselin family lives?

i live near this one - the news said that police have responded to incidents there over 90 times in the past 2 years

This reminded me of this WSJ article earlier about general rampant craziness at Chuck-e-Cheese's all over the country: [online.wsj.com] They mention this same CEC in the article about halfway down, which is from almost a year ago.

The EPA needs to shut all of them down and quarantine the ball pits.

Friend of mine's little girl told another parent, "I can't go there because my mommy says it's dirty."

@Elvisisdead:
*You might want to remind your friend that children have an immune system so she can tell her daughter to go have fun.

Additionally, this is Chuck E. Cheeses.
The ball pit is the last thing a mysophobe (germaphobe?) should be worrying about.

*Just in case my sarcastometre is broked.

@ChuckECheese:

They used to...then common sense prevailed.

I used to work there (first job) and it was bad enough w/o alcohol involved.

Chuck E Cheese has skee-ball? Man, that is ALMOST enough to get me inside one of those places. Almost.

@ChuckECheese: The metaness of your name is FREAKING ME OUT!

@rhys1882: Dead linkey.

@ElizabethD: The one by us has skeeball. That was pretty much the only thing worth doing in there.

@tmyprod: They still sell beer and wine at my neighborhood Chuck E. Cheese! Apparently, common sense has not prevailed everywhere?

@ElizabethD: Somewhere other than Chuck E Cheese has skee ball? I've never seen it anywhere else!

@H3ion: Oh god, I think you're right. Heh.

My fondest memory of Chuck E. Cheese's (then Showbiz), is two of these stories in one: A family fight and leaving a child.

But seriously, playing that Bozo the Clown ball-toss-in-a-bucket game was pretty cool. And yes, skeeball lanes galore.

Never would have happened at a Showbiz.

@rhys1882: @bohemian: remove the period at the end of the link.

@thisisasignin: There is a difference between being an OCD germaphobe who bathes little Danny in Purell every 5 minutes and not wanting your child to play in a pile of toys that are literally smeared with visible chunks of another poorly toilet-trained child's feces. You think those things actually get cleaned more than once a year? At least pools have chlorine.

@rhys1882: Holy cheerios, rhys1882, that article is amazing. Here's a working link -- [online.wsj.com] -- and highlights from some of the fights it describes:

...a woman in her 30s approached a 6-year-old boy who was playing a videogame. When the boy went to insert more tokens to continue playing, the woman grabbed the tokens out of his hand and told him to stop hogging the game. The boy went and got his 26-year-old mother, who walked over to the woman. The woman began screaming at the boy's mother, and another suspect, a man in his 30s, grabbed the mother by the throat and pushed her against the videogame machine. CEC employees had to pull the man off the mother. Both the man and the woman fled the scene.

Ms. Clifton had come out of the bathroom when she saw a woman yelling at her daughters and her friend.

[...]

That touched off a fight between more than 10 people, in which participants punched and screamed at each other. One woman removed the red rope that marks the entrance queue and handed it to another woman, who swung the metal clip attached to it at others involved in the incident.

Skeeball was fun at Chuck E. Cheese but that was about all. The one I went to was dirty, and tolerable only during off-hours. On weekend nights the noise level was unbearable and chaos reigned. Low class parents brought their children to run wild and would just leave if their kid went too far. The staff seemed completely uninterested in keeping an eye on things. Don't miss the place a bit.

@Chris Walters: It's like, what the hell is WRONG with people?

I remember Chuck E. Cheese from my childhood as being tacky and having sort-of terrifying animatronics lacking patches of fur here and there, but pretty well-controlled.

@bohemian: Agreed!

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): I put in some time working at an arcade before I started college and let me tell you, people get so HARDCORE about those darned games that give you the little tickets. It's like they are uber desperate to get whatever cheap trinket they are trying to save up for.

@yevarechecha: I feel the same way about the Playplaces Mcdonald's has. Nas-ty!

@TheOrtega: This comment certainly makes some people actually want to go there.

I believe the restaurant in the post is the same Chuck E Cheese where this was filmed.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Thank you. The reason for it is that my first name is Chuck and my middle initial E. So occasionally people call me that. That's pretty much where the similarities end. I've never visited one. I should.

@Ayarkay: i used to work at disneyquest in orlando - "indoor interactive virtual reality adventure" and the most popular game/ride in the building was the skeeball machines in the retro section.

None of these shenanigans happen at the Leo T Catnip franchises.
Mauled children, rent, hanging intestines and male lion musk sprayed across the torsos of quivering guests, sure. But mauled children? Mauled children are well-behaved children.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): I remember Showbiz Pizza seemed pretty laid-back, if a bit rinky-dink, when I was a kid. The ban always seemed under repair, but I was too obsessed with Dig-Dug to care.

Then in college my friends and I had a party at Chuck E. Cheese, and even then pitchers of beer at a kiddie pizza joint seemed to me like a bad idea.

@ChuckECheese: Growing up in Central PA, its just as crazy as you would think. Its why I chose to go to school in the city to get away from the rednecks and boredom.

@ChuckECheese: They don't serve alcohol anywhere except bars and high end resturants in PA. Liquor licenses are very expensive.

@H3ion: No, they're closer to Allentown. This is Harrisburg. Few hours apart.

@BytheSea: Beer/wine licenses are less expensive than liquor licenses, and that's all ChuckECheese would need.

@AJ_Syrinx: Um, do you live here? They don't seel beer/wine licenses in PA. There's no alcohol in PA Chuck E Cheeses or any other resturant that doesn't have tableclothes.

@Chris Walters: I recall hearing a tale once of a crew closing up one night at a CEC. Guy walks in, takes the cash from the register, shoots everyone working there execution style, walks out. The lights were all still flashing, the band playing, bells going, and all of the on-duty employees dead on the floor. Talk about creepy...

@catastrophegirl: Skeeball is AWESOME.

@dragonfire81: Many places I know of have gotten rid of ball pits...I haven't seen one at a McDonald's since the early 90's ,nor does the generic family fun center and newer Chuck E Cheeses

@rocketbear79:
WTF is that last post?
Having grown up in PA and then moved around quite a bit (and known bar owners in several states) PA has some of the roughest liquor laws I've seen.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): The foreshadowing of the Decline and Fall of Western "Civilization" is what is wrong with these people. 50 years from now we'll look back and think of this as a golden age. I'm not religious (anything but, really) and I don't intend the comment in any specific political light, but our little insulated empire is crumbling.

@Bluth_Cornballer: Yes it was...they've had trouble at that location before and there's been incidents at the Lancaster one as well this year.

@BytheSea: They're actually closer to Reading (west of it)...split the difference between Harrisburg and Allentown

@yevarechecha:
Thanks for that. There goes breakfast.

my mom always though CEC was tacky, however decided discovery zone was more appropriate

**turns on singing voice**

"I'm going DZ at Discovery Zone.
Discover what I can do on my own!
I can jump, swing, crawl or mountain climb.
I'm going DZ, where I want to be!"

anyone?

My bachelor party will be at Chuck E. Cheese. I want to party with those guys!

@TheOrtega: What the hell? I haven't been to a chuck e cheese in a good twenty or so years but this sounds crazy. I know plenty of bars that aren't that rowdy. Maybe it's the combination of kids+adults that bring out the crazy.

@Chris Walters: Showbiz Pizza was the best! I always wanted to have my b-days there as a kid before they closed up. The part about the band is so true, we always felt lucky if the animatronics were working during our visit. Showbiz always felt more magical than Chuck e cheese but then again I was younger at the time.