Vol. IV, No 10, October 2004

In this issue

1. Editor's Corner
2. Food Network Interviews Randy White
3. Shakey's Celebrates 50 Years of Eatertainment
4. Paradise Park Wins Best FEC Award
5. Four Keys to Good Service
6. World's 1st Parks Department Children's Edutainment Center
7. Dino-tainment: Dining with Dinosaurs
8. Meet Me at IAAPA Orlando
9. What's More Important: the Entertainment, Food, Service or Ambiance?
10. Resorts Target Preschoolers
11. MaryGolds Family Event Center
12. White Hutchinson Goes RSS
13. No Longer "a Material Girl in a Material World"
14. New Church & Religious Institute Web Section
15. Consumers' Choice Restaurant Awards
16. Foundations Entertainment University Registration Available

[ Index of Previous eNewsletters ]

Editor's Corner

Here we are, almost time for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin. Children are settled back into the school routine, theme parks and water parks are closed, and community-based leisure destinations are ramping up in business.

Several weeks ago, Vicki and I went out to dinner at a new restaurant to celebrate her birthday. The restaurant was recently opened by a chef who had finally decided to do his own thing by opening a restaurant. It had received a number of rave reviews for its food, so we thought it would be a good choice. We went on a week night, so the restaurant was not busy when we arrived - in fact, we were the first customers. As we entered the parking lot, we saw a number of the staff sitting out front of the restaurant, smoking. The restaurant was in a rather run-down strip shopping center, and the restaurant storefront looked more like a bar with a neon beer sign in the window. Not good omens, but we forged ahead, anyway.

The inside looked better than the outside. Nothing fancy. Just one medium-sized dining room with a bar along one wall. However, the music was extremely loud. As we were the only customers, we asked the waitress if she could turn down the music. Her first response was something to the effect that it was hard to control the volume, and if they turned it down too low, they had a problem getting it back on. I persisted in my request, so the waitress finally went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later the music volume was lowered to a tolerable level.

I won't give you a blow-by-blow description of our experience, other than to say the service was marginal, but the food was perhaps the best we can remember, and at a reasonable price.

As we left the restaurant, Vicki and I turned to each other and basically in unison said, "Great food, but I wouldn't come back."

That leads into a common theme in three of this issue's articles: Four Keys to Great Service, What's More Important, the Entertainment, Food, Service or Ambiance? and the Consumers' Choice Restaurant Awards.

Like our recent experience at the restaurant proves, excelling at only the key attribute of your facility doesn't assure success, ultimately defined as pleased guests who return. The business must excel in multiple aspects, including the service, the quality of the environment (ambiance, atmosphere or what we call quality-of-place) and perceived value.

Unfortunately, many of the family entertainment centers we have seen over the years that ended up as road kill, as well as many we have seen that barely squeak by in paying the bills, are much like the restaurant we visited. Our chef focused on the food and forgot to pay attention to things like service and atmosphere. Too many entertainment venues focus only on the entertainment mix and forget about the service, ambiance and other environmental qualities such as cleanliness. Customers walk out their doors on the first visit, and just as we said the restaurant we visited had great food but we won't be back, they say it was great fun, but they won't be back. Check out the articles in this issue for more insight into what it takes to bring your customers back for more.

I always appreciate feedback from you as our reader. If you have any suggestions, ideas or questions, don't hesitate to contact me. With all my travels, e-mail is the easiest way to reach me via e-mail.

Randy White
Editor

Food Network Interviews Randy White

On Sept. 28, the Food Network sent a crew to interview Randy White, our CEO, as an eatertainment expert for an upcoming segment on that topic for the cable television show Unwrapped. They then traveled to Paradise Park to film the children's edutainment center there as an example of our company's eatertainment projects. Watch for a future announcement of when the show will air.

Jim Doblin, Food Network producer, interviews Randy White at White Hutchinson's offices.

Food Network films children's interactive cooking at Paradise Park.

Shakey's Celebrates 50 Years of Eatertainment

Fifty years is a long time for a company to stay in business, especially in the restaurant industry. This year Shakey's Pizza is celebrating its 50-year anniversary.

Shakey's was founded in 1954 in Sacramento, California, by Sherwood "Shakey" Johnson and Ed Plummer. It is believed to have become the first franchised pizzeria chain. It probably holds another first: the originator of the eatertainment concept that incorporates game rooms with food. Yes, that's 25 years before Chuck E. Cheese's opened.

The business came to be when "Shakey" Johnson pooled his $3,400 with that of a college friend, Ed Plummer, to open the first Shakey's. The building was a remodeled grocery store located at 57th and "J" Street in Sacramento. The parlor opened on Friday evening, April 30, with $1.85 in the till and the two owners and their friends as servers. As the ovens were not complete, no pizza was sold the first weekend, only beer. Johnson played the piano and entertained, and Plummer served beer.

With money from the beer sales, the partners bought pizza products and began selling pizzas on Monday. Ten days later, they had 14 employees, and a month later, Dixieland jazz entertainment was added.

With the success of the first restaurant, Johnson and Plummer opened a second Shakey's two years later in a remodeled mattress factory on Foster Road in Portland, Oregon. The Shakey's name and concept were already familiar due to the nightly jazz radio program they sponsored. In 1957, Shakey's became one of the first food service companies to begin franchising. The franchise units also introduced a standard Shakey's building design. Prior to this, the restaurants had always been located in existing remodeled structures. Johnson retired a multimillionaire in 1967 (at which time there were 272 Shakey's restaurants across the United States) when he sold his half of the company to the Colorado Milling and Elevator Company of Denver, Colorado.

An early Shakey's Pizza

A more contemporary Shakey's

Shakey's began to expand outside the United States in 1968 with the opening of restaurants in Winnipeg and Manitoba, Canada, in February of 1968. Expansion then went southward with the opening of the Mexico City restaurant in May of 1968. The first Japanese restaurants opened in Osaka, Tokyo, in July of 1973. Expansion continued with restaurants opening in Santoloc, Manila, and Rizal, Philippines, in 1975.

A year later (1968) the Colorado Milling and Elevator Company of Denver merged with the Great Western Sugar Company to form Great Western United Corporation. In that year, Plummer sold his half interest to Great Western United Corporation and retired. The chain was then 325 restaurants strong. Hunt International Resources acquired Shakey's, Inc., in 1974.

Gary Brown and Jay Halverson, former Shakey's employees who became franchisees, purchased Shakey's Incorporated in 1984, and in 1989 sold the chain to Inno-Pacific Holdings Ltd., a Singapore-based company.

The Jacmar Companies, the largest franchisee with 19 restaurants, recently purchased the company from its struggling parent, Inno-Pacific Holdings.
Jacmar plans to expand the chain and move it back into the national spotlight.

In the 1970s, Shakey's had over 500 restaurants. Since then, it has suffered a serious decline, down to currently 61 franchised restaurants in California.

Shakey's is testing store design upgrades and new food items, including fresh entrée salads and rotisserie chicken. The chains traditional menu consists of thin-crust pizzas, fried chicken, seasoned "Mojo" potatoes and salads.

Paradise Park Wins Best FEC Award

Paradise Park in Kansas City, Missouri, the family entertainment and children's edutainment center designed and produced by White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group, won the Golden Token Award as the best new/renovated family entertainment center by the International Association for the Leisure & Entertainment Industries (IALEI) at its annual FunExpo convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sept. 30, 2004. The award is given each year to recognize design excellence in the family entertainment center industry, which includes over 20,000 facilities worldwide.

CEO Randy White said, "We and the Ellis's, the owners of Paradise Park, are proud the project is receiving this recognition as the best new project in the industry. Over the years, many of our projects throughout the world have received recognition and awards, but it is especially gratifying when we are able to bring one to our own hometown."

To learn more about Paradise Park and to see a slide show of photos and video commercials, click here.

Four Keys to Good Service

Just because today's customers are satisfied doesn't mean they're loyal, according to research by AchieveGlobal, a training and consulting firm based in Tampa, Florida. The research shows that 80% of consumers who have switched providers of a product or service said they made the change despite being satisfied with the original company.

AchieveGlobal's research revealed that to earn customers' loyalty, companies must master the service qualities most valued by their customers. The research revealed that regardless of industry, geography, product or service, consumers consistently value four qualities of service:

• Attentive Service - Consumers want caring and individual attention paid to them, and consider this most important. They want to be recognized quickly, politely and with respect.
   
• Trustworthy Service - Consumers want what is promised, and they want it provided dependably and accurately. They want to feel they're in capable hands and that promises and commitments will be kept. They want things to be right the first time, and if something does go wrong, they want it resolved quickly and thoroughly.
   
• Seamless Service - Consumers expect frontline staff to coordinate everything. They do not want to have to deal with several people during the same transaction.
   
• Resourceful Service - They want prompt service, as well as prompt and creative problem-solving if something goes wrong.

Sharon Daniels, CEO of AchieveGlobal, explained it this way, "Employees must have the ability to listen to and understand a customer's needs and offer a solution that will meet or exceed their expectations. That's what makes the difference between a routine encounter and a great service experience."

World's 1st Parks Department Children's Edutainment Center

White Hutchinson has begun design and development work of the world's first children's edutainment center to be owned and operated by a public park department. The project, temporarily named the Three Rivers Children's Discovery Play Center until its brand name is developed, will be located in the 69-acre Three Rivers Park in the Gary/Lake Station area of Lake County, Indiana.

In 2003, the Lake County Parks Department retained White Hutchinson to conduct a feasibility study for the project. As a result of the study's findings and recommendations, Lake County Parks obtained state authorization to issue $5 million in bonds to finance the project.

The Three Rivers Children's Discovery Center will be the most advanced version of the children's edutainment center concept White Hutchinson first created in 1995 and has been evolving and perfecting ever since. The Center will include a 22,000-square-foot building, about one acre of outdoor play areas, and a 'learning swamp lab' area designed to introduce young children to concepts of environmental conservation. In another first for a children's edutainment center, an inlet area will be connected to the park's 35-acre lake where children can catch small live fish (to be thrown back, of course. Hey, maybe a do-it-yourself fish fry should be considered).

Vicki Stoecklin, Education & Child Development Director, Dave Williams, architect, and Doug Pickert, landscape architect, evaluate existing conditions at the future site of the Three Rivers Children's Discovery Play Center. "Hey, who brought the fishing gear?"

The Center's theme will be based on earth stewardship and creative arts. Possible alliances with area arts organizations are currently being explored to bring artists into the facility on a regular basis to work with children. Recycled art is one area of creative art that lends itself well to the Center's theme.

Plans are for the project to earn a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) "green" building certification. Randy White, our CEO, recently completed his LEED Design Professional training. Designing a green building requires a concurrent or integrated approach, rather than a traditional linear or sequential design. Everything impacts everything else, so all the different design professionals must be continually interacting to find the best whole building design solution. Our company has always used concurrent design, as it assures the best design solutions at the lowest possible cost. Green building design is just another natural extension of our concurrent design process.

This shows a computer model that tests different design scenarios using natural daylight to totally light all public areas during the daytime, thus saving on the cost of operating electric lights. The modeling looks not only at the illumination levels under different weather conditions, times of the year and times of the day, but also at how uniform the lighting will be. Modeling the daylighting under different design schemes contributes greatly to examining different lighting and energy saving options during concurrent design.

The Lake County Parks Department decided to develop the Center for a number of reasons. Three Rivers Park in the northern part of the county was slated for improvements to enhance Department offerings to northern county residents. The Department's current children's programs have a primary focus on middle age and older children, so a Center focused on children 8 and younger helps round out the Department's offerings to county families. Income from the project will help fund other Department programs (as with commercial edutainment centers, there will be an admission fee to the Center). Lake County Parks already operates a major water park, Deep River Waterpark, which contributes significant funding for their Park programs.

Dino-tainment: Dining with Dinosaurs

In our June 2004 issue (see T-Rex is Coming), we first reported on the new T-Rex restaurant being developed by Steve Schussler, who originally developed Rainforest Café. We have since learned more details about T-Rex.

The restaurants will be multi-level in size from 15,000 to 30,000 square feet, where kids of all ages can dine, shop, dig and explore. Or as Schussler said, "Reality and whimsicality meet to educate, entertain and create." The concept will be built around themes of water, fire and ice. Environments will include waterfalls, geysers, and ice caves that will be enhanced with animatronic dinosaurs.

Schussler believes that "People [will] come first for the wow factor, then come back for the great quality food." Schussler goes on to say that "If a restaurant is heavily themed and a big-box, there's a perception among food critics that the food can't be great." Schussler claims that T-Rex will deliver four-star food with an eclectic menu of entrees prepared three ways - flame seared, heat seared and stone seared - and will include everything from sushi to pizza to vegetarian and vegan dishes (Hey, lots of dinosaurs were vegetarians). The average check is projected to be $17.50.

"Our business plan and mission statement is to keep these (restaurants) at a very low number," Schussler said, unlike the case with Rainforest Café. "I'd rather have this concept be more rare than something that's all over the place." T-Rex concepts are currently planned for Los Angeles, Orlando, Minneapolis, New York City, Kansas City and Las Vegas. The first will open at the Mall of America in May 2005, and the second will follow at the Legend's shopping complex in Kansas City, Kansas.

Meet Me at IAAPA Orlando

If you're planning to attend the IAAPA convention in Orlando, Florida, Nov. 14-20, don't miss the seminar Randy White will be presenting on Edutainment: The Next Big Thing, Thursday morning at 8:30 AM. Randy will be reviewing the societal changes that are driving the trend to incorporate educational content with entertainment, explaining exactly what edutainment is. He'll also discuss examples of the latest edutainment concepts, including children's discovery play centers and children's discovery farms. He has invited Mark Hayward from BRC Imagination Arts, one of the world's top leisure venue design firms, to join him to review one of their most recent projects that marry entertainment and education: The Ford Rouge Factory Story.

White Hutchinson doesn't have a booth at IAAPA, so if you would like to make an appointment to meet and chat at the show with our CEO Randy White or with Jolie Stoecklin, our Procurement Manager, just give us a call at 816.931-1040, or you can e-mail us.

What's More Important:
the Entertainment, Food, Service or Ambiance?

Over the past several years, we have written a number of articles about how importance the atmosphere, ambiance, or what we call quality-of-place, is to the success of location-based entertainment facilities (LBEs). Many LBEs, to their detriment, tend to ignore this important critical success factor, mistakenly believing it's the entertainment that creates the guest experience. Yes, the entertainment is important, but just as important is the environment in which it is delivered, the quality of service, and food service (also so often neglected). We call these four critical success factors - quality-of-place, the entertainment, guest service and food service - the Big Four Success Factors (not to be confused with the Big Four in basketball).

Recent research in both the restaurant and hospitality industries gives strong anecdotal evidence to the importance of quality-of-place in the equation of success.

J.D. Powers and Associates, in the 2004 Restaurant Satisfaction Survey(sm) of quick service and family/casual chain restaurants, found that overall customer satisfaction is based on the overall customer dining experience, with four factors that are nearly equal in importance:

• Environment - 24%
• Meal - 30%
• Service - 26%
• Cost - 21%

The study was based on responses from nearly 55,000 customers who dined between May and August 2004. It looked at customer repurchase behavior and future spending intentions and found the customer experience with these four factors were the most important drivers of loyalty commitment.

In a research study reported in the journal Food Quality and Preference, Professor John Edwards at Bournemouth University in the U.K. wanted to determine what variables made the most difference in customers' appreciation of a given dish. So his researchers took one dish, Chicken à la King with rice, that was uniformly prepared, and served it to public participants in a variety of locations, ranging from a home for the elderly to a four-star restaurant.

The dish got the best reviews when it was served in a four-star restaurant. Edwards concluded that design and environment play a large role in how the public feels about the food it eats. He also found that the manner in which it was served also had a lot to do with the ratings. "The results show that in many cases the environment is actually far more important than the food. Go to a place where they serve pretty poor food, but where atmosphere is good, the company good, and the waiter polite, and it is probably more enjoyable than the stuffy place with the brilliant food," Edwards said. "When we eat, there are three things that make up the occasion: the food, the consumer and the situation. Most people just consider the food and only now are we beginning to understand the importance of the situation, the ambiance, what the waiter says, and so on."

The August 2004 issue of the journal Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly reported on a similar study, The Relative Importance of Food, Atmosphere, and the Fairness of Wait. The study found that only three attributes - food (being the most important), atmosphere of the dining area, and fairness of order of being seating - are significant predictors of overall dining experience satisfaction. The authors of the study, Professor Joanne Sulek and Assistant Professor Rhonda Hensley at North Carolina A&T State University, point out that atmosphere includes décor, noise level, temperature, cleanliness, odors, lighting and color. They said, "The way the restaurateur expresses these characteristics helps to create an expectation of the dining experience even before the customer is served."

Similar findings of the importance of atmosphere or quality-of-place have been found in other research studies, including Demonstrations of the Influence of the Eating Environment on Food Acceptance, reported in 2000 in the journal Appetite.

A research study by NFO Worldwide took a somewhat different research approach with 600 frequent quick service restaurant patrons by comparing their answers on what they said was important to them with their responses on what influenced their purchasing decisions. NFO Researcher Shubra Ramchandani described the results as the things consumers want from quick service restaurants that they're not getting. The top 5 were:

1. Friendly and polite service staff
2. Service staff that is knowledgeable and able to answer questions
3. Service staff that shows pride in the restaurant
4. A restaurant that is in touch with customer's special needs
5. An enjoyable overall atmosphere

That doesn't mean that food quality and value aren't also important. But "everybody is delivering at a high level," Shubra said. "Menu items, quality of food, wait times. So you filter down to service-related items."

Finally, in the same August 2004 issue of the journal Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, a study of hotel loyalty authored by Cornell Hotel School Professor Judy Siguaw, titled Are Your Customers Loyal?, found the chief factors that build guest loyalty were hotel design and amenities. The study also found that guest satisfaction with hotel ambiance positively affected word-of-mouth. The study looked at responses to questionnaires returned by 364 guests from two different hotels. The findings from the research support those from a 1999 study in the hotel industry on the importance of design and amenities as drivers of guest satisfaction.

So, although these studies were looking at two related leisure venues, they both found that quality-of-place was an important driver of loyalty and repeat business. Just an in a restaurant, where the environment has a significant impact on the customers' overall experience, satisfaction and desire to return - even though they primarily came to enjoy the food -- the same holds true with LBEs. Guests come to an LBE for the entertainment (and hopefully also the food), but the quality-of-place also has a major impact on their overall satisfaction with their experience and repeat business.

Resorts Target Preschoolers

In last month's issue, we wrote about the size of the 2-year-old and under market (The Neglected Age Children). In addition to the 2 and under market, 3 to 5 year-olds are typically neglected in most leisure venues. Preschoolers, children from infancy to age 5, are a mega-market when it comes to attracting families. About 50% of all families with children 18 and younger have at least one preschooler, and about 25% of families with children have only a preschooler.

Vacation destinations are getting the message and starting to target this preschooler family market. Nickelodeon and Holiday Inn have partnered to open the first Nick-themed family resort in Orlando, Florida. Scheduled to open in the spring of 2005, the Holiday Inn Family Suites Resort is undergoing a $20 million transformation into the Nickelodeon Family Suites Resort. The resort's 800 suites include two- and three-bedroom Kidsuites that give kids their own space and entertainment areas and provide parents with a comfortable, family focused environment.

Rendering of Nickelodeon Family Suites Resort in Orlando, Florida

The resort claims that "An infusion of [new] water attractions, newly themed suites, banquet space and a show room, will transform the property into a world class resort destination, a virtual city where 'Kids Rule.' Guests will be as comfortable in their suites as they are in their own homes, but once outside it will be a "cruise-ship-on-land atmosphere." There will be lots of activities to enjoy onsite, including water park-like pools with slides and flumes; poolside game areas; a nationally branded food court; themed pool bars and grill; daily Character Breakfasts; a gigantic game room; scheduled activities for all ages, a recreation team and Nickelodeon live, nightly, scheduled interactive entertainment."

Orlando isn't the only location where resorts are working to attract the preschooler family market. Beaches Family Resorts by Sandals has partnered with Sesame Workshop to the create the Beaches Caribbean Adventure with Sesame Street. Kid-friendly features include story time with Elmo, nature walks with Grover, dance classes with Zoe and cookie baking with Cookie Monster. In conjunction with the launch, a six-week Elmo and Gordon tour will bring Sesame Street live performances to a number of Beaches Resorts during this fall.

As more and more vacation destinations sharpen their acts to increase their appeal to the preschooler and parent market, expectations of both children and parents (and grandparents) are sure to rise. Many community-based entertainment venues are sure to find they will be judged by the higher guest expectations these other facilities create. As a result, we predict that games, rides and soft-contained-play will increasingly become judged as inferior offerings.

MaryGolds Family Event Center

Our company has begun full design work for MaryGolds Family Event Center in Lanham, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb. This 12,000-square-foot facility could best be described as taking a stand-alone birthday party facility to the next level. MaryGolds will not only accommodate children's birthday parties, but also group functions with as many as 200 people, including wedding receptions, private dinners, meetings and varies types of celebrations. The facility will include a full-service kitchen, reception area and children's entertainment area. MaryGolds will also accommodate visits during the week by stay-at-home moms with preschoolers. MaryGolds is scheduled to open in early 2005.

We are pleased to have been selected as the design/producer for this cutting-edge project that is defining a new venue category.

White Hutchinson Goes RSS

We have updated our web site to now offer the option of RSS feeds. What is RSS? RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is an easy way for you to keep updated automatically on web sites you like. Instead of having to go to various sites to see if they've posted a new article or feature, you can use RSS to get them to tell you every time they have something new. To use RSS, you need a program called a News Reader. This displays RSS information feeds from your chosen web sites on your computer.

Our web site offers you the option of getting feeds from the three sections of our site:

• Children's Play & Learning Environments
• Leisure, Entertainment & Recreation Projects
• Church & Religious Institution Family, Children & Youth Facilities

You can sign up for one, two or all three. Our web site will then automatically feed your News Reader notices of eNewsletter postings and new information postings such as articles and project information from each respective section.

To learn more, to find some News Readers or to sign up for RSS feeds, go to

www.whitehutchinson.com/rss

No Longer "a Material Girl in a Material World"

Madonna needs to get a new tune. We're no longer in the Madonna world of being a "material girl in a material world;" not according to University of Colorado at Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven. Through a series of surveys and experiments that included more than 12,000 people over several years, Van Boven and fellow researcher Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University found that people from all walks of life were made happier by investing their discretionary income in life experiences rather than in material goods.

Van Boven suggested three possible reasons that "experiential" purchases - those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience - make people happier than material purchases.

1. Experiences are more open to positive reinterpretation, because they tend to be associated more with deeper personal meanings, whereas possessions are always "out there" and separate from who we are, according to Van Boven.
2. Experiences are a more meaningful part of one's identity. "Our culture highly values accomplishing goals and challenging oneself. We strongly value accomplishments," Van Boven said. "Also, experiences tend to be associated more with personal meanings than possessions."
3. Experiences contribute more to social relationships. Van Boven said that experiences are more pleasurable to talk about and they more effectively foster successful social relationships, which are closely associated with happiness. "Experiences foster relationships because you tend to do things with other people, so there is a great social aspect to it," Van Boven said. "Furthermore, we often share stories about experiences because they're more fun to talk about than material possessions. They are simply more entertaining."

Van Boven's research found that a higher percentage of women were happier with experiences than were men and that individuals with higher incomes and more education especially tended to prefer experiential spending - perhaps because the less discretionary income you have, the more any purchase will improve your quality of life. However, not a single demographic segment reported being happier with their material purchases.

The research authors summed up their findings: "The good life may be better lived by doing things than by having things."

A trend toward experiential spending is supported by the increase in service spending. For Americans, it has increased from 40% of their incomes in 1959 to 58% in 2000. The figure is understated, as in many cases goods and services are bundled together, yet classified as goods. Food is just one example. The U.S. government in its Consumer Expenditure Survey considers food a nondurable good. Today, consumers dine out for much more than just food for nutrition -- they are seeking the experience the restaurant provides. Dining out is about much more than avoiding cooking. Diners are seeking different cuisines in pleasant and exciting environments. To be successful today, restaurants can no longer consider aesthetics an afterthought. It is an essential part of the dining experience.

Today, creating economic value for consumers is increasingly coming from the emotional value and intangibles that experiences and experiential offerings create, rather than tangibles alone. This trend should continue, because as incomes increase, Americans and consumers in many other countries will spend a greater proportion of their income on the intangibles and less on material goods.

This emphasis on experiential spending is both good and bad news for the location-based leisure venues (LBLs). First the good news. Consumers are increasingly seeking experiences, which are the primary offering of LBLs. Now for the bad news. Every consumer destination, whether it is a restaurant, store, airport, or even a hospital, is enhancing the experiential components of its offerings. This is not only increasing the competition for the discretionary time and money consumers have for experiences, but also raising the bar -- and bar is getting higher at an almost exponential rate.

For example, restaurants in both the quick service and casual segments are undergoing radical upgrades in ambiance to enhance the experiential value of their offerings. "Everybody is going upscale today," said Joel Swirsky, an operator of Denny's, Golden Corral and Coco's.

Borders and Barnes & Noble are just two examples of how book stores have reformatted their offerings to be more than just a place to purchase books. They have cafes, book readings and presentations by authors and have become community and meeting destinations. Visit a Barnes & Noble on a Friday or Saturday night, and you'll be surprised how many people are there, and they aren't all coming with the original intent of purchasing books.

To gain a market share of the expanding universe of experiential offerings, LBLs need to upgrade their presentations to offer more than just entertainment, in the same way restaurants are upgrading to offer more than just food, and airports are offering more than just airplane transportation, with upscale food courts and retail 'malls.'

New Church & Religious Institute Web Section

Our work designing church and religious institution programs and facilities that focus on children, youth and families is on the increase, which is why we have created a separate section on our web site for that work at

www.whitehutchinson.com/religiousfacilities

Over the next several months we will be adding to its content. It has its own separate RSS feed link if you are interested in getting notification of new content as it is added to the section (see story above for information on RSS).

Consumers' Choice Restaurant Awards

Each year, Restaurants & Institutions magazine has the Reed Research Group conduct a survey, the Consumers' Choice in Chains, to gauge guest loyalty among R&I's list of the 200 largest chain restaurants. Survey respondents who visited any of the chains during the previous year are asked whether they would go back. Additionally, their level of satisfaction is measured by their ratings for eight attributes: food quality, menu variety, value, good reputation, service, atmosphere, cleanliness and convenience. To determine an overall score, the attributes for each restaurant segment are weighted based upon how important consumers rate each attribute in selecting a restaurant in each given segment. The results of the most recent survey of 2,625 consumers were just published in the September issue of R&I. Results were weighted to match the overall U.S. population by gender, household income, race, region and age.

Here are a few highlights of the survey's results. We've picked the restaurant categories most comparable to the types of food service that family and children's location-based leisure facilities might offer. Scores in red denote the highest score in that category.

When you look at consumers' top choices in each category, it is interesting to see that those particular chains won because they were rated tops in at least four of the attributes.

Panera Bread was very highly rated. Excluding the ratings for Italian sit-down, seafood, casual dining such as Applebee's, and steakhouses, none of which are shown above, Panera Bread had the highest overall score and attribute ratings for food quality, good reputation, atmosphere and cleanliness. With its high ratings, its no wonder Panera Bread now enjoys average annual unit sales of about $1.8 million. It has become the benchmark by which many consumers judge mid-price, order-at-the-counter restaurants. Excluding the not listed restaurant categories, Jason's Deli rated highest for menu variety, Cici's Pizza highest for value (of all categories) and In-N-Out Burger highest for service (Panera was second).

We included the ratings for Chuck E. Cheese's, which comes in ninth in the pizza category. Although it rated very low in seven attributes, it came in tops in the pizza category for atmosphere. We're not sure if that speaks highly for Chuck E. Cheese's, or poorly for the pizza category. The four pizza chains that are sit-down and not carry-out that have higher overall ratings than Chuck E. Cheese's - CiCi's, Godfather's, Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza - scored between 38 and 44 on atmosphere compared to Chuck E. Cheese's score of 62. With its low ratings as a restaurant, you would think that Chuck E. Cheese's would not have good sales. Yet, its units average $1.6 million, more than double the sales of any other of the top-rated pizza chains, with the exception of CiCi's, where CEC has 78% higher sales. Shows you the power of combining decent food with entertainment. CEC's sales probably also attest to the persuasion and nag-power of kids when it comes to where the family goes to dine.

Foundations Entertainment University Registration Available

Full details and registration information is now available for the three 2005 Foundations Entertainment University 3-day seminar programs. Past attendees have given Foundations glowing reviews. Nevertheless, based upon attendee feedback, we have been continually improving the seminar (read past attendee testimonials). The 2005 seminars should sell out early, so don't procrastinate on registering and miss out. Foundations will be located at three cities that Southwest Airlines and other discount airlines fly to, so if you book your flights early, you should be able to get very reasonable airfares.

The 2005 dates and locations:

• Feb. 8-10, 2005, Dallas, Texas
• July 19-21, 2005, Kansas City, Missouri

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