Chuck E Cheese Melee

A recent report vindicates my avoidance of Chuck E Cheese. My main reasons have been that I worry about restaurants that trumpet their associations with rodents, and that they are brainwashing Sesame Street-watching munchkins with their ads on PBS. Plus, I also hear that the food sucks and the place is a rip-off.

As if all that weren't enough, the Wall Street Journal reports that the police are being called in to break up more fights at some Chuck E Cheese locations than at nearby biker bars. In some areas, the restaurants have been forced to stop serving alcohol and start staffing the place with armed guards after incidents like an 80-person melee in Flint Michigan earlier this year.

Now, the only way you were going to drag me into one of these places was with the promise of beer, so that's another strike against them. However, Rebeldad seems to disagree.

Among other incidents in the article:

In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese's.

Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child's birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain's namesake mouse perform.