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White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group, Kansas City, MO, USA

Predictions for the New Year

2004 is almost here, so we thought we'd join all the futurists and bring you our top ten predictions of what we think the new year and beyond will bring for the for-profit, community-based entertainment industry. If you are a regular reader of our eNewsletter, some of these will not be new, as we have been writing about many of them as industry trends. We'll try to keep it short and sweet. The predictions are not in any particular order of importance:

1. The winning concepts in the future will target college-educated parent families and be developed around quality food, socialization with family and friends and fun (notice we deliberately listed fun last).
2. Families will continue to spend an increasing percentage of their incomes on out-of-home entertainment (more about this in our January 2004 issue).
3. Edutainment concepts will continue to gain an increasing market share of out-of-home entertainment visits and expenditures.
4. Skeeball will remain popular for another 94 years.
5. Getting maximum value for 'use of time' will be a greater determining factor for out-of-home entertainment visits than cost.
6. Entertainment that does not cater to the trend of New Luxury (upscaling) will perform poorly and lose market share.
7. Classic entertainment family entertainment center formulas will continue to loose relevance to Third Millennium families.
8. Entertainment will continue to become commoditized, challenging entertainment destinations to reposition themselves by offering more value than just fun (more about this in our January 2004 issue).
9. Many entrepreneurs will continue to develop location-based entertainment centers that become roadkill, as they will disregard, through ignorance , arrogance or androcentrism (male-bias), the industry's lessons from the past (some things never change).
10. Agritainment and Nature-tainment (children's discovery gardens in botanical gardens) will continue to gain market share with families with young children (hooray for the farmers and horticulturists!).
    

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