“Wow! What a rip-off!” I heard this early during this year’s trip to Elvis Week. The lady that said it was having issues with the lockers located outside of the ticket office at the visitors’ center at Graceland. From what I heard them say, part of her issue was trying to use Canadian quarters to pay for a locker. Some of her Canadian quarters had become lodged in the locker. She was also complaining that you had to put more money in it every time you opened it. I don’t have any idea how much the lockers cost or how much change they had fed into them already. But their complaints were small compared to the ones from the lady I heard call it a rip-off last year. Losing some change to a locker was small compared to the complaints last year about the price of the tours and parking. But complaining about Graceland has become the number one spectator sport in Memphis during August.
This year was the 45th anniversary of the death of Elvis and the 5th anniversary of the new visitors’ center. The 5- and 10-year anniversaries are always bigger events and this one was no exception. The parking lot was nearly at capacity when I arrived around noon. The last few years, there was no problem finding good parking close to the entrance. This year it was hard to find a parking spot at all. In addition to it being a “big” anniversary, there were a lot more international fans this year. Last year, the COVID travel policies helped keep the crowds smaller. This year, I was noticing more foreign languages and accents in the crowd. While I was committed to making this year’s activities more like a normal year, I would be careful to avoid long lines and crowded spaces. I have successfully avoided COVID so far and I thought an international strain of the virus might be more resistant to any American vaccinations.
Late in July, I heard a news report that bonds that had been issued by Tennessee to help Graceland through the effects of COVID on tourism had gone into default. Currently, the state, the city of Memphis and Elvis Presley Enterprises are pointing fingers at each other as the reason for the default. I was happy to see so many people in the museums and around the visitors’ center in hope that enough money would be brought in and keep the place going. I did my part by paying to tour everything but the mansion. I had gotten bored last year with a limited number of gift shops to visit and small crowds. This year the museums had a generous amount of traffic. I noticed that there were more opportunities to spend extra money to hang out with celebrities. They had celebrity Q&A sessions that included Pricilla, Pat Boone, Barbara Eden, and Elvis’ close friend Jerry Schilling. While they had done this type of event in the past, there were more of them this year. I was near the doors of the Graceland Soundstage where they were holding these sessions when one of them was letting out, and people flooded out the doors.
I’m sure the hope is that these crowds are significant enough to give Graceland the extra boost that it needs to be more independently viable. Elvis Week is like Black Friday for Graceland. And the big anniversaries provide more opportunity for them. We will have to wait and see if there is more encouraging news in the months to come.