Most chairs in a room this big should lock together, so in the event of an evacuation, the room doesn’t get scattered with random chairs, blocking egress. That locking mechanism would automatically align the chairs.
I work at like 850 cap event center and we don't have locking chairs like this.
Ngl having to set up and tear down hundreds of locking chairs 5 times a week would be a huge pain in the ass. We used to have them like that in my church growing up, but they stayed out all the time.
I’ve worked events in NYC and Las Vegas where we had rental chairs that didn’t lock together, and we had to have a crew go through each row with zip ties to make the Fire Marshall happy.
Tbf I live in a liberal city and yeah I agree with the politics here but dude the fire Marshall is on a POWER TRIP here. I can't think of a single venue where they haven't just absolutely busted their balls and basically just keep giving them fire code violations for next to no reason. It's actually kinda crazy because the buildings here all all ancient, every venue was already struggling from covid, the fire codes shut them down every other weekend to the point they BLEED money... On top of that they just added a new Art tax that completely fucks music venues and no one knows where the money goes...
And these aren't shady greedy assholes these are people I know personally trying to organize events for small artists and they just can't manage a dime of profit.
And because of the fire code here it ends to being a situation where by hiring _____ amount of employees for an event that suddenly makes it count as an official event with more strict codes... So it's based on employee count not attendee count. So we end up with a situation where hiring less safety help somehow excuses even more safety concerns...
At my church which can seat comfortably 600 people though we can pack in more for certain events.
We have those interlocking chairs and put them up and take them down every Sunday. The church is also a school and we meet in the gym. During the summer there are a lot of events going on during the week too.
It doesn't take long and when the youth are on a trip or something we get the whole congregation to pitch in which takes like 10 minutes. We stack the chairs 11 high and have a dolly roll them to storage.
The youth group usually does it and they get paid to do it.
Same where I work we can accomodate up to 1000 with the halls booked daily for varying events with different types of set ups. No locking chairs at my place just for operational feasibility of setting up for 5-8 events per week.
You just lift them up? I work in events and have to deal with them to abide by firecode and all it takes is to lift them straight up. I don't see what the big difference is here.
They're honestly not that bad after you get used to them. But I used them at a university venue so we had plenty of cheap labor and maybe that was a factor.
Nah the locking chairs are way better. I worked at an event center that had both locking and non locking. The locking chairs were way faster to get into straight lines as well as refresh during multi day events. Took slightly more time to unlock and restack after but barely much more. One person just goes along, knee on the adjacent chair and lifts it up then goes to the next one. Can do a row in 1-2 seconds per chair. Way more time saved than when they used the non locking chairs and at the end of the day the whole room was completely fucked and we had to go and straighten every single chair.
As someone who set up my chairs in my parents church, while they lock together they have some wiggle room. Over a long run of chairs you could get a decent curve. We’d just eyeball it though
If you've ever been a Deacon in a Mormon church that had to setup chairs in the overflow, or at a stake conference, you know all too well about setting up the interlocking chairs.
Had locking chairs at a small venue (~200) in NYC, took a little longer to set up, but breaking down was essentially no different from if they were loose. Pull up on back of chair to unlock from neighbor, kick lower brace to fold, onto the cart.
you could easily make a circle of hooked chairs. if you noticed when one of them moves a single chair, the chairs beside it move with it, showing they are already hooked.
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u/guyako 1d ago
Most chairs in a room this big should lock together, so in the event of an evacuation, the room doesn’t get scattered with random chairs, blocking egress. That locking mechanism would automatically align the chairs.
I guess Pigeon Forge isn’t big on fire codes.