Some McDonalds with indoor playground near me may be a bit cautious in providing the best options for your kids. They will go out of their way to make sure you end up with a positive experience that you’ll never forget. Just visit this site and use the filters to find what you’re looking for within your budget .
McDonald’s Arndell Park, NSW
The chance to design, produce, and construct the playground in McDonald’s Arndell Park in Western Sydney was fantastic.
Slides, tube crawl climbers, pods, and personalized graphics are all throughout this enormous playground. The placement of the pods and our grass panels in front of the store is a fantastic aspect of this unique playground. Families can observe the playground from the street in this way and get a glimpse of the enjoyment to be had!
The play area in McDonald’s Arndell Park has received over 25 reviews on Google Reviews, considerably enhancing their company! Some of our favorites are listed below:
“My son adores their fantastic children’s playground so much.”
“Best children’s playground I’ve ever seen at any McDonald’s!”
“Good place for breakfast with a children’s indoor playground”
Where Have All the Fast-Food Playgrounds Gone?
Plastic slides and ball pits disappear as companies stop marketing to children.
On a Saturday afternoon at a McDonald’s in Brooklyn — one of the newer McDonald’s made to more like a cafe than a fast-food restaurant — “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” is playing over the Muzak speakers, and the current Happy Meal toys are Hot Wheels and miniature Barbie dolls. The Playplace, during what should be prime Saturday afternoon birthday party hours, is empty and locked. Between the song, the toys, and the locked playground, this McDonald’s looks like it stopped trying to attract kids in 1995.
A table of boys, around ages 8 through 13, are talking excitedly, half on their phones and half chatting. Would they be in the playground even if it were open? Today, these standard modular play structures — padded floors, platforms, polyurethane foam piping, a single plastic slide — are probably considered boring after age 9. At another McDonald’s, on Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach, the indoor playground has been removed and replaced by more seating. At a Chuck E. Cheese’s near Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, a place where playgrounds are admittedly secondary to a casino of kids’ games, the usually standard play area is gone, too.“When stores are being rebuilt, they’re no longer including these play places.”
How much does a playground at McDonald’s matter to kids today? Their parents might not even be taking them to fast food establishments because they have iPads and Game Boys. Families with children eating at McDonald’s decreased from 18.6 percent in 2011 to 14.6 percent in 2014, according to Technomic, a company that conducts research and advising on the food industry.
Darren Tristano, president of Technomic, thinks that we’re unlikely to see fast-food restaurants focusing on playgrounds again anytime soon. “I’m not sure that they’re becoming a thing of the past, but we clearly don’t see growth in the opportunity for restaurants,” Tristano says. “Brands like Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s, who have indoor play places — we’re not necessarily seeing them expanding and, in some cases, when stores are being rebuilt, they’re no longer including these play places.”
If there are other public spaces where kids can play, is closing the playground truly a terrible thing? possibly not Families will still visit McDonald’s, but it’s terrible to see kids eat a Happy Meal and then have nowhere to do but play on their phones or iPads. A fast food playground may be the only affordable location for a child to roam around during the severe winter, especially in rural or suburban areas: While a Happy Meal only costs $3, a trip to a speciality indoor playground can cost up to $12 per child.
Given that McDonald’s is still the location to send your kids for chicken nuggets and a few hours of respite after a shopping excursion, indoor playgrounds are unlikely to ever completely disappear. But given that many chains are shifting their marketing away from children and toward millennials, could we be seeing fewer of these structures?
Paige Johnson has some experience with playgrounds. She runs the site Playscapes and is the historian and playground advocate behind a nanotechnology firm. In particular, Johnson feels that the structure seen in modular “post and platform” play areas, as opposed to the more architectural, playground-as-art spaces that you could find in a children’s museum, is changing the character of play away from a static, specific structure.
Johnson cites Pokémon Go as an example of modern leisure since it offers a personalised, non-geographical experience. The play is moving in that way, she asserts. Not only as a location-free experience, but also as a personal, customized experience that lives with the participant. And the question is: How can any static playground, be it in a neighborhood or a fast-food restaurant, compete with that experience or meet modern definitions of play?
Playground equipment bearing the McDonald’s logo first emerged in 1972 when McDonaldland, a theme park with a cast of kid-targeted characters, debuted at the Illinois State Fair. The fast-food fantasy realm depicted in McDonaldland had a mayor with a gigantic cheeseburger for a head, a small-time criminal named Hamburglar, a cop named Officer Big Mac, and Captain Crook, a pirate (Mayor McCheese). The first McDonald’s playgrounds, featuring features like Captain Crook spiral slides and Officer Big Mac climbing frames, debuted a few years later.
Eric Schlosser claims in Fast Food Nation that Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom is heavily influenced by McDonaldland, which is probably accurate given that Don Ament, a former Disney set designer, created the play structures. Companies increasingly develop “cradle-to-grave” advertising tactics, hoping that people will buy their products for the rest of their lives because of their fond memories of them as children, according to Schlosser. They now acknowledge what Walt Disney and Ray Kroc understood many years ago: “A person’s ‘brand loyalty’ may begin as early as the age of 2.”
McDonaldland wasn’t just a play area; it was a whole marketing campaign with commercials, a kids’ magazine, video games, and The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, a direct-to-video series made by the Rugrats creators. Most of us probably had at least one birthday party at McDonald’s, our parents offering friends orders of four-piece chicken nuggets or a small cheeseburger, followed by a cake bought from the local grocery-store bakery.
Because the idea of the physical play area was so well-liked, McDonald’s decided to separate The Playplace into a separate brand of indoor playgrounds in the early 1990s. Leaps & Bounds was a chain of indoor play spaces that paid parents $4.95 for kids to have unlimited access to. The first facility opened in Naperville, Illinois in 1991 and had 11,000 square feet of play space. Leaps & Bounds, Discovery Zone, and Blockbuster Entertainment Corp. were all combined by McDonald’s in 1994. The occasional sighting of Ronald McDonald is the only trace of that era that can be found today, at least in the restaurants.
Tristano claims that investing in a playground at this time wouldn’t be very wise from a business standpoint for a fast food establishment. In addition to the price of the square footage, there are additional expenses for the equipment, upkeep, safety risks, and insurance. The larger playground has been replaced with a smaller, more compact playground over the past 30 to 40 years, and in some cases, it has even moved outside, which is problematic in the winter. It has grown to a point where it is much smaller and less important.
It is hard to discuss fast-food indoor playgrounds without taking into account two of its primary drawbacks: the liability they entail and the public’s opinion of these play facilities as being unclean. For years, there have been several urban legends spread concerning things found in ball pits, for example. (Has one ever actually included a heroin needle? No, according to Snopes.)
Despite this, playgrounds can undoubtedly be filthy places: At poorly maintained play areas, coliform, staphylococcus, and fecal bacteria strains have been discovered. Apparently for swabbing play areas for germs, Dr. Erin Carr-Jordan, a playground sanitation vigilante and, more formally, the founder of Kids Play Safe, a research organization “committed to protecting the health, safety and well-being of children,” was barred from eight McDonald’s in the Phoenix area in 2011. It started as a cross-country trip where she evaluated the playgrounds of six national chains in high and low socioeconomic, rural, and urban locations. When it comes to incorporating responsive, digital play experiences, playgrounds lag horribly behind.
According to Carr-Jordan, “I think the widespread issue and how it resonated with people in general was enough to create a response from parents across the board.” “Many business owners and operators, and this is just my supposition, didn’t want to put in the effort to keep them, and it wasn’t always worth the inconvenience of actually getting in and maintaining the equipment and cleaning it on a regular basis. That, in my opinion, is the case with McDonald’s, which explains why so many of them are closed.
Surprisingly, there are no state or federal laws governing playground upkeep or cleanliness, and many counties and localities have no laws either. In her native Arizona, Carr-Jordan has been successful in her efforts to change that. According to a news release, Kids Play Safe and Chuck E. Cheese’s recently joined to “collaborate on similar aims to promote a safe healthy play environment for kids.” The first significant company to collaborate with Kids Play Safe is Chuck E. Cheese’s, which may be a tiny step toward enhancing the public perception of restaurant playgrounds.
It’s a relatively simple remedy, according to Carr-Jordan. “The issue is tied to three things: 1) cleanliness, 2) building upkeep, and 3) harmful chemical use during cleaning. We totally agree to clean this once every shift, Chuck E. hopped in with two feet and remarked. Both the front and back of the house will switch to green items. They also promised to review the integrity and upkeep of their buildings in accordance with the criteria.
More than anything else, indoor playgrounds appear to be in change. When it comes to incorporating the more responsive, digital play experiences that children today want, playgrounds are terribly behind the times. Playgrounds are being removed from some restaurants including McDonald’s franchises in favor of additional seats and less land expenses, while others are being enlarged to promote active lives for children. According to Lauren Altmin, a McDonald’s PR representative, “McDonald’s has always placed a special emphasis on the family experience and will maintain that legacy.” Franchisees that opt to integrate the Playplace feature in their restaurants have the ability to meet the demands of their local community and patrons thanks to the Playplace’s progression throughout time.
The Golden Arches may actually be one step ahead, it turns out. A 22-foot-tall play structure, an even larger (and lit!) Ronald McDonald, and the kitsch addition of an animatronic singing “Mac Tonight,” the chain’s late-night lounge singer spokesperson from the 1980s were all included in the opening of Orlando’s “biggest entertainment McDonald’s” last year. It will be fascinating to watch whether further franchisees adopt this concept.
Johnson says, “I’d love to see them explore the concept of their tacky play sculptures. “A set of arches the kids could play on would be just as entertaining as what they currently have and would enhance their architectural style. In my opinion, the future belongs to items that can compete with a digital environment and are more visually appealing and interesting.
There are myriad opportunities to make indoor playgrounds, simply put, really cool. Corporations can also look to Europe for inspiration: The Swarovski Crystal World playscape in Austria and Volkswagen’s super-modern Mobiversum are excellent, albeit slightly extreme, versions of what can happen when corporate money meets playground architecture.
According to Johnson, abstraction gives kids the freedom to imagine whatever they want their artwork to be. “Physical objects cannot be changed in the same way that digital ones may be changed repeatedly. That kind of innovation has not occurred in the playground world. McDonald’s may have pioneered the concept of a play area in a restaurant previously, and if they were more deliberate about it, they could do so again.