Monday, May 28, A.D. 2012

Chuck E. Cheese: All up in Your Grill

Happy Memorial Day!

While you celebrate, I suggest that you avoid the kiddy pizza playground place, Chuck E. Cheese, unless you live in Vermont, West Virginia, or Idaho.

Steve Sailer posted an entertaining blurb last month about a Daily Mail report on the episodic violence at Chuck E. Cheeses in America: “Daily Mail: ‘Why has children’s party restaurant Chuck E. Cheese become a hot spot for grown up brawling?’” As a solution, Sailer discusses a fascinating article in The New York Times, “Let the Nanotargeting Begin,” by Thomas Edsall:

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times puts up some more of those political / marketing research graphs I showed in Taki’s Magazine two years ago. They are from National Media Research, Planning and Placement and show Democrat-Republican skew on the left-right axis and propensity to vote on the vertical axis. Here, for example, the most Democratic-leaning clientele of restaurants belong to Church’s Chicken, Popeye’s (chicken), White Castle, and Chuck E Cheese’s. This may help answer the classic Daily Mail headline Why has children’s party restaurant Chuck E. Cheese become a hot spot for grown up brawling?

The Daily Mail reporter is rather mischievous in covering C.E. Cheese mayhem. He notes:

David Schwartz, a psychologist and professor at the University of Southern California viewed some of the fights on YouTube and told Nightline that he was not surprised at the behavior displayed.

“Birthday parties are really emotional situations. There’s frustration and provocation. A parent will never be more ready to defend somebody than when they’re with their child.” he said.

Then, the reporter provides a series of photographs and videos of these “really emotional situations.” Yeah . . . I would like to call such journalism “Drudgesque Surrealism.”

Apart from Chuck E. drama, the graphs that Edsall and Sailer reproduce are fascinating. I would not have guessed that non-voting (“loser”) Democrats were the chief audience for fake wrestling or that voting (“employed”) Republicans were the main watchers of the Olympics in the U.S.A. I would not have thought that Disney viewers skewed slightly Democratic or were unlikely to vote, unless they count children. Parents who watch the Disney channel with their children (1) have cable, (2) have children with whom they spend entertainment time, and (3) gear such time around the children’s tastes. Such people must be overwhelmingly women, which might explain the Democratic edge, but don’t mothers vote? I was also surprised by the skew for Cracker Barrel customers. I fully expected them to be Republicans—white folks who enjoy old fashioned Southern cooking—but not people so likely to vote. That means that the Republican upper middle class likes to eat at Cracker Barrel. There are no corresponding chain restaurants for upscale Democrats because such folks tend to avoid franchises on principle and to live in places where the only chains are fastfood joints. In D.C., one must leave the city to access stores that are omnipresent in middle class suburbia.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, May 28, Anno Domini 2012
Philosophy | Anthropology • Politics • (0) Comments