First, I love taking my daughter to Chuck E. Cheese (she's almost 20 months old now). This location was the pits so far in my 3 restaurant experiences.
The one on Shops Lane, zip 32258 was the best so far out of the three we have tried in Jacksonville during my work travel, but didn't have the animatronic Chuck E. Cheese unless I missed him. The games all worked, plenty of ticket munchers, and the food was very good. Plus it was extremely clean. They have a cool dance floor. They don't have a playground area though. It was extremely well-staffed and everyone was courteous. The one problem we had is somehow the orders vs table numbers got messed up. We were being told to take the wings we did not order. Another staff member came to our aid and figured it out. They also did not kick people out after they closed, they just did there cleaning and were entertaining.
The next was on Youngerman Circle zip code 32258. They were smaller and had issues with the beer (they kept taking big bowls of beer to dump in the back). Games worked and they had a decent ratio of ticket munchers. Pizza was ok. They had a decent staff level. They had a working animatronic Chuck and a costumed Chuck once during our visit.
We sort of knew we were in for an adventure when there was a police cruiser and officer inside at the front door. Still, I was going to treat my daughter to a nice time as a family of three (I spent about $90, did the military Bravo deal and added another 100 tokens plus two large beers which were sort of flat). I should have surveyed it first and drove to Shops Lane. Many of the games were out of order, many more didn't work properly (no tickets, controls didn't work, scores didn't register), but had no sign on them. The pizza was terrible...not to mention they were out of mushrooms. It reminded me of the bad pizza they served in the 70's when I was a boy. They only had one cashier and the customers seemed to have a hard time getting their orders placed. I found this out when I had all my stuff ready, but it was a tedious process. The cashier kept getting called by staff telling her things were out and had to call back people to reorder. I was one of them. Most of the rides that give pictures were out of paper. They did have two craft type beers which is wierd (one was 312 which was in the spot my Michelob Ultra would be so we had to go with Bud Light, we usually do our two beers each so they lost $10 in sales and probably $9 in profit from that).
The place was dirty, by the playground they had a ton of old gum(?) stuck on the carpet. Only two ticket munchers (the third was broken). They had the animatronic Chuck, but he was broken. They did have a costumed Chuck throwing tickets a few time during our visit. Other parents were complaining and many mentioned the Shops Lane is much better. The management/franchise should do a deep dive on this location (there was throw up in a bathroom we mentioned and about 30mins or so later was still all over the place). The playground area was big though and that is about the only plus I can give them and my daughter learned to climb it and had a lot of fun there, except for one little girl taking her shoe and hiding it in it. We asked a little boy's mom if her son could find the shoe. He gave him some tickets after we asked first when he returned excited with the shoe. He was really happy about that.
That whole area is terrible, the Regency Mall is almost deserted and the staff that still works there is usually not good. The McDonalds across the street pretty much from Chuck E Cheese took 10 mins to get two unsweetened ice teas due to chattering workers in the drive-through lanes and not telling the car in front of us to pull into the waiting spaces. Both the lady behind me and myself parked our cars to walk inside to get our stuff. read more