Posts Tagged ‘SIX FLAGS’
Fan Appreciation, Dan Snyder Style!
Hoping to hold on to some of the season ticket holders that are still around, Dan Snyder has announced what a pop-up ad on the team's Web site calls a "Free Fan Appreciation Day, to be held June 1 at the Six Flags park in Largo.
Judging from the fine print, however, Snyder doesn't appreciate all fans equally: Only those who have suite or club seats, which cost several times as much as the 60,000 or so general admission tickets at FedExField, are invited to the party.
Geez...
But, remember, this is from the same guy who charged $25 parking to a previous "Fan Appreciation Day" event at FedEx.
Cheap Seats Daily: Best Owner List Shocker: Leonsis Left Off! Worst Owner List Non-Shocker: Snyder, Lerners Left On!
Sports Illustrated released Top 5 best/worst owners lists for all the major sports. Our town's fabulously represented, though only on the dark side.
First off: Ted Leonsis somehow wasn't included among hockey's best. If there's ever been a more beloved sports owner in this town than Leonsis circa 2009, I can't remember him.
Hard to believe it's only been five years since Leonsis was brawling with home fans at Caps game, eh?
But he was. Days after he unloaded Jaromir Jagr and his $11 million salary to the Rangers in January 2004 in the midst of a talent purge, a 20-year-old season ticket holder named Jason Hammer brought a sign to the then-MCI Center that said "Caps Hockey, AOL Stock -- See a Pattern?"
Hammer sat among a group of fans heckling the owner, and waved the placard at Leonsis throughout the game. Leonsis got so incited he went after the kid in the concourse after the final horn. The account of the incident in the Washington Post said Leonsis "grabbed [Hammer] by the neck and threw him to the ground."
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's Chapter 10.9 theme park chain, Six Flags, announced today it lost another $146.3 million in the first quarter of 2009 and that revenues were down 24% compared to the same period last year.
Snyder blamed the downturn on having Easter 2008 counted in the first quarter, while in 2009 it was a second-quarter affair.
Guess a lotta folks commemorate the resurrection of Jesus by paying $30 parking, eating $9 slices of pizza and riding rollercoasters named after licensed superheroes.
Who knew?
But that's not today's only big Six Flags news: Mr. Six has a Twitter account!
Yeesh.
In announcing the pedo-mascot's Tweeting venture, Six Flags spokesperson Angie Vieira Barocas declared, "Mr. Six has quite the imagination and is definitely hip to pop culture."
Really? Well, they said the same things about the Craigslist killer.
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's magna cum hurtin' theme park chain, Six Flags, has hit the small time: After being bum-rushed out of the New York Stock Exchange, Six Flags and its $2.4 billion in debt showed up yesterday on the OTC Bulletin Board, a minor league trading venue for so-called penny stocks.
Snyder got some nice sendoffs during his last days on NYSE.
On Thursday, bond rater Standard and Poor's lowered Six Flags corporate credit rating from CCC, or "junk," to default status.
And a day later, during Six Flags' final stand on the big board, investors were trading its stock (SIX) for just 13 cents a share.
That's a new record low.
There Is Such a Thing as Bad PR for Dan Snyder
Poor guy can't even get his name spelled right.
The front page tease for a really kind story in today's Washington Post about Dan Snyder's run atop Six Flags (no mention amid all the turnaround talk that the company went another $134 million in the red in 2008) had the chairman of the board's name as "Daniel Synder."
In this case, that spelling was likely unintentional. But, for Snyder, the letter arrangement couldn't be more unfortunate: Snyder haters have been using "Synder" in blog posts and even Snyder's own message board for years just to poke him.
Though if Jason La Canfora was anywhere near the control room at press time, who knows?
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's fiscally fisted theme park chain, Six Flags, just took another shot up the poop chute: The company was informed today that it has been kicked off the New York Stock Exchange.
Everybody but Jim Cramer has predicted the demise of Six Flags since Snyder put his management team in place and started raising the parking rates in late 2005.
But throughout the death watch, Snyder's held on like Sunny von Bulow.
Alas, even Sunny eventually went gently into that dark night.
Not to be confused with the Dark Knight, a featured roller coaster at many of the Six Flags parks.
Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder's Six Flags soap opera.
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's juxtanothing theme park chain, Six Flags, is back in the news. For all the wrong reasons.
Snyder's sub-Mensa-esque brainchild, the network of stand-alone kiddie hair salons known as Six Flags Rollercoaster Cuts, opened its first outlet in West Hartford, Ct., and started hawking costly coif makeovers with dumbass names -- The Glammy, Zoink, Big Kapow and Blama Jama -- to breeders of young New England bluebloods.
Yet the liberal media was only tweeting about the parent company's economic woes.
Seems Vegas is torn over what will come first: Snyder's company going bankrupt or 64 1/2 seed Morehead State getting bounced from the NCAA Tournament. (Gimme Morehead in that pool!)
In a conference call with Six Flags investors this morning, Snyder's cohort Mark Shapiro pinned Six Flags' sorry chances for staying afloat on a failure to communicate with his major creditors.
I'm no Ben Bernanke, but I'd say the hole Six Flags finds itself in is probably related to both whatever communication breakdown Shapiro is whining about, plus the fact that his company is MORE THAN $2 BILLION IN DEBT!
Yet before we credit all of Six Flags' problems to Snyder's ineptness, let's gander at Mark Shapiro's portfolio.
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's contra-profitable theme park chain, Six Flags, hit another personal worst today.
At approximately 11:11 a.m. EST, Six Flags stock (SIX) traded at 15 cents a share. That's a penny less than its previous record.
So while banks and other biggies rallied this week, Snyder et al kept on keepin' on along the path to bankruptcy. The headline of the Wall Street Journal's latest pre-obit for the company -- "Six Flags Braces for a Dive" -- was a little misleading.
Sure, the situation at Six Flags is getting a little more attention now than usual. But anybody who's watched the company since Snyder took over has long been as braced for a dive as the 82nd Airborne on D-Day.
So let's take another look at the Big Board:
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's giga-screwed theme park chain, Six Flags, has more in common with the country's ailing financial institutions than their shared borderline insolvency. Jim Cramer boldly led investors toward Six Flags throughout its plunge, too.
Cramer's getting crushed by Jon Stewart, of course, for being so wrong so often about the health of Bear Stearns and other big money types.
Less consequentially, but just as wrong, Cramer has also been in Six Flags' corner since Snyder took over the company in late 2005.
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's hyper-moribund theme park chain, Six Flags, has apparently misfollowed an accountant's directions.
Somebody must have told Snyder the company, which is more than $2 billion in debt, had to make cuts.
Instead of hacking away at line items in the budget, Snyder has decided to cut kids' hair.
Rumors on City Desk last week have since been confirmed: Snyder will indeed be launching a line of kiddie hair salons, called Six Flags Rollercoaster Cuts.
Six Flags has taken out want-ads looking for employees for the first Rollercoaster Cuts outlet, to open in March in West Hartford, Conn.
The ads describe the business as "a truly unique children’s boutique" that will be "offering young thrill-seekers a Six Flags experience in a one-of-a-kind setting."
"Rollercoaster Cuts clients (kids only) will be treated like royalty from the moment they enter the brightly colored salon boutique," reads the pitch to workers. "This state-of-the-art design features a 22" flat panel TV in each station. Children will be engaged and amused as they are fully immersed into a Six Flags experience by watching Six Flags TV or riding one our virtual Six Flags’ roller coasters making it easy and fun for stylists to work on children’s hair."
Info in the want-ad indicates that Snyder's plan to get Six Flags out of its 10-figure debt also includes the selling of "mini-manicures."
Update: SIX Flagging
This is so stupid, I can hardly type:
Dan Snyder's pseudo-afloat theme park chain, Six Flags, a company already balls deep in debt -- we're talking BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of debt here -- is apparently about to launch its own line of kiddie hair salons.
Snyder's burgeoning debacle-within-a-debacle will be called Rollercoaster Cuts and its tag line will be "A Hair Razing Experience!"
Get it? Yeah, me too. Though "A Hair-Brained Idea!" is more what comes to mind here.
I'm stunned by the dumbassery. I'm cold and clammy as I type: Dan Snyder is opening up a chain of kiddie hair salons!
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's post-prosperous theme park chain, Six Flags, is borrowing a page from the Redskins playbook in an attempt to return to its glory days.
Just as Snyder brought back Joe Gibbs in 2004 with the Redskins hitting bottom, Six Flags is pinning its future to the return of....Mr. Six!
There's been message board chatter about a comeback by the pedophilishy bald old dude mascot for months.
Now, it looks like the rumors are about to become reality.
At a recent convention of theme park enthusiasts, says one attendee, Six Flags' spokesperson Brooke Gabbert told the gathered coaster obsessives that Mr. Six will be the focus of the company's marketing campaign for 2009.
Mr. Six predates Snyder's reign atop Six Flags. One of Snyder's earliest decisions after taking over the company in late 2005. after all, was to jettison the creep.
But, by now, everybody looks back at the days with Mr. Six as the face of the franchise as a Golden Age.
That was, after all, a time when Six Flags stock (SIX) could be sold for $11.93 a share.
The stock price went to poop as soon as Snyder started implementing his rebuilding strategy. After sinking as low as 16 cents a share, SIX has been waddling from 31 cents to 33 cents and back for a couple months now.
It didn't help that Snyder's pick as Mr. Six's replacement, an unnamed Asian character who screamed "More flags! More fun!" a lot, only brought complaints that Six Flags was racist.
Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder's Six Flags soap opera.
Update: SIX Flagging
Dan Snyder's non-liquid theme park chain, Six Flags, has decided that if it's going to go down, it's going to go down tipsy.
In 2008, firms that were nowhere near as leveraged as Six Flags, which is anywhere from $2 billion to $3 billion-and-some-change in debt, tended to sign on for Chapter 11 protections or just go away.
But Six Flags, albeit with its stock still cratered (down from a Snyder-era high of $11.93 to just 16 cents a share a couple months ago) and its future bleaker than Levi Johnston's, made it through with no such filings.
And with the new year has come the first good news of Snyder's disastrous reign atop the corporation, which began with a stockholder coup he led in late 2005 amid promises he'd boost the stock price and make the parks more family friendly: A barrister in Texas on Friday ruled in favor of Six Flags after a nasty battle over the chain's request to be allowed to sell booze at two parks in the state.
From the Dallas Morning News:
