[logfromblammo]

I have to wonder why more residents aren't trying to milk money out of the tourists. Isn't that what is supposed to happen around every tourist attraction?

If I lived there, I might just pave a few extra parking spaces into my property and charge $5 for first 30 minutes and $5 each additional 60 minutes thereafter. Buy lemonade, hiking maps, souvenir magnets, and postcards from the kiosk. 10%-off coupons for checking in on social media. Hey! Hey! Hey mister; hey lady! You wanna buy Hollywood Sign t-shirt? Hollywood Sign keychain fob? How about shopped photo with your name in place of the real sign? Don't just take selfies! Everybody takes selfies! Buy something no one else has; buy this volume-printed diorama of the sign and surrounding park, signed by the artist! Limited edition!

Whenever I have been a tourist, the single best way to make me want to leave and never return is to subject me to a continuous barrage of sales pitches for useless attraction-related crap. Example: every square centimeter of Disney World. That's like the ultimate goal of merchandising, when it all sort of collapses into this state where everything becomes an advertisement for itself, and everything you buy subtly encourages you to buy more, or maybe just put all your cash in a paper envelope and deposit it into a slot under the Walt and Mickey statue.

That's how you ruin an attraction. You don't just make it secret and exclusive; that only makes people want it more. Instead, you relentlessly try to squeeze every last drop of money out of it. If you really want the people to stop coming, your Holy Grail is the online review that says, "Not worth the $10 parking space in some guy's front yard. Locals aggressively sell touristy crap, and the sign itself seems kind of cheap and pathetic from up close."

Of course, the downside is that unless you have some sort of "identify friend or foe" system in place, you get a dozen sales pitches every time you walk from your own driveway to your own house.

[HelloMcFly]

The people that own those houses have enough money that it isn't worth the time investment to make a little extra cash, even if the side benefit it ruining the experience. That's a hell of a time commitment.

[logfromblammo]

Your Poe's Law handheld disambiguator device should have read about 75% insincere on my ancestor post.

I am fully aware that a NIMBY neighborhood, such as the one near the sign, would actually tar-and-feather the first person who tried to treat the invading tourists as anything other than vermin to be eliminated.

I was simply making a modest proposal, to contrast against the actual efforts of the local homeowners to discourage tourist traffic.

For instance, a while ago, I agreed to go with my family to Grand Canyon national park. I had but one condition: under no circumstances would I be asked to buy anything at any gift shop filled with touristy crap, nor even be requested to enter one. And guess what happened. We still spent over three consecutive hours in a thrice-cursed gift shop, wherein I was asked repeatedly to buy junk of the lowest quality. That was more time than was spent looking at the actual canyon, for which there was no additional charge beyond the cost of park admission.

That kindled a great fight, which everybody lost.

More recently, we visited New Orleans. My sole condition of the pre-trip planning was "No French Quarter." And guess what happened. My matrifornicating in-laws wanted to eat dinner at Hard Rock Cafe. On deity-despised Bourbon Street.

So I find that the single most effective way to make me passionately hate your locale and avoid it like an Ebola-infected bat roost forevermore is to make it into a tourist trap.

[majormajor]

Disney World is the most visited theme park in the world. Good luck at scaring tourists away by turning something into Disney World...

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

[logfromblammo]

Of all the family vacations I have ever taken, visiting Disney World as an adult represented, by far, the worst ratio of relaxation and entertainment enjoyed per dollar spent.

It's one of the few places on Earth that makes me wish I was back at home, working all day.

But it is such a massive black hole for tourism that I was still somehow find myself there against my will sometimes. Then, when we're all back at the hotel, thoroughly miserable, someone asks, "Why are we even here?" And no-one knows. Clearly, someone thought that it would be fun this time, but it never actually turns out that way. Nobody even remembers planning the trip. We all thought we were going to a beach up on the Florida panhandle. But when we arrive, it's actually Clearwater, near Orlando. Every road we take, trying to get back to the beach, twists around like a Moebius strip, and ends up right back in the Disney World parking lot, under the monorails.

So we say to ourselves, "Ok, we'll just get one pineapple whip, and then we'll leave, and try to get to the vacation we actually wanted." Then we trudge up Main Street USA and hang a left, then another left, and another left, spending 20 minutes to go from the park entrance to the nearest place in the park that sells the cursed treats, when I know damned well that the employee utility corridors underneath us, on the first floor, are straight and efficient. So we think, "As long as we're here, we might as well go on one of the rides, right?" And we get into line. We get through that line, which leads to another queue. And that takes us into a vestibule, where we see a short video with a group of other guests. After it finishes, the doors open into another queuing labyrinth. When we wait long enough to get through it, there's just one more line, and after that, we're on the actual ride. We get into the ride vehicle, and sit through five minutes of something that may have been considered to be good, clean fun in the 60s, but is now disappointingly dated, racist, and sexist. Afterward, we are deposited in the gift shop, which stands between us and the exit. After escaping, now we need to pee, so that's another unnecessarily long journey across the park and possibly more queuing. By now, it would be too late to get to the beach before dark, so we just decide to finish out the day there.

Again, how the heck did we even get there in the first place? Was it a Groupon? Maybe a neighbor couldn't use their vacation club passes this year? We won the trip in a sweepstakes? Booked by Satan's own travel agency? Nobody knows. We just end up there, being milked of our hard earned cash, like cows with udders overfilled with silver nitrate solution.

Nobody actually wants to be there. They all just show up one day, and are too exhausted to fight their way back out of the parking lot.

[lordnacho]

This is a brilliant post! I love the idea of scaring away tourists by making it more touristy.