Why people are starting to hate Disney World

So I'm 51 now, and one of the things I remember from my childhood vividly is we'd all be watching a big sporting event like the Super Bowl or the World Series. And at the end, there'd be the celebratory winners, the people who just won it all, and they'd be getting interviewed and they would say something crazy, which was they'd say, they'd be asked, what are you going to do next? And this sports star would say, I'm going to Disney World. You and the San Francisco 49ers just won back-to-back Super Bowls. What are you going to do next? Going back to Disneyland! But fast forward 30 years later, you don't hear that stuff anymore. And at the same time, the pendulum has swung pretty much the other way. YouTube and social media today are flooded with people hating on Disney's parks, World and Land, whether it's California or Florida. And when I was a kid, going to the Disney parks was like a rite of passage. My parents drove us across 6 states to be and take us to a spring break vacation at Disney. And today the parks are kind of an afterthought for many people. And it turns out this entire situation is a deliberate strategy driven by the almighty dollar and some weird circumstances around the Disney Corporation. This video is the why of the rise and fall of Disney World.

Oh, and by the way, thanks to Wealthfront for sponsoring this video. More on them later.

And by the way, I just walked through what is the most dangerous intersection in San Antonio next to this highway. They had to put up these barricades because people kept getting walking over. And getting mowed over by cars here because they don't stop. Yeah, it's that kind of town. And I make a deeper dive document that accompanies each one of these videos. You can download it for free on my website, girdley.com/youtube. If you want more of the story to understand how we got here, you got to understand the original vision behind Disney World. You see, building theme parks was not actually Walt Disney's original vision. You see, in 1965, Walt Disney bought 27,000 acres of swampland in the middle of Florida. More than the size of Manhattan. So a lot of land. And the idea was that the theme parks were going to be created in order to fund his bigger vision, which was he wanted to build the city of tomorrow. EPCOT wasn't going to be a theme park with a place you could go get a margarita from, you know, the Mexican booth at the Circle of International or whatever it's called. We did that when I was a kid. It was actually supposed to be a new city with 20,000 residents and basically be his version of utopia. In fact, Walt Filmed a whole video recording his vision for the entire EPCOT, like, new city. But unfortunately, he died in October 1966 of lung cancer. Believe it or not, even though we don't have many videos of the guy smoking, he was a maniacal chain smoker and lung cancer killed him. Roy Disney was his brother and he was in the company and he kept the idea alive. But the board of Disney at the time thought that building an entirely new city was just too risky. They scaled down the vision and in 1971, the Magic Kingdom opened up. Just one theme park. And the tickets? $3.50. $27 in today's money. Roy would go on to die just 3 months after opening that park. And suddenly Disney was left with no family members in the business anymore. And Walt's whole vision for a new city would be fundamentally abandoned and replaced with a new vision. For the next 30 years, the corporation actually lived up to a lot of what the two brothers believed in. But then something would change. And back in the '80s, there wasn't a lot of competition for our interest. And there weren't even a lot of theme parks at that time. Presented a perfect growth opportunity with so many kids being born to the baby boomer generation to basically build out the entire Walt Disney World complex. EPCOT came in 1982, Disney-MGM in 1989, and in 1988, Animal Kingdom. It was still affordable. In 1990, a one-day ticket was $35, about $82 in today's money. In 1999, they introduced FastPass, which was basically a mechanism where people could get a little ticket and then come back later when the ride was ready for them rather than sitting in long lines. And the key distinction was everybody got it. If you watch the old videos of Walt Disney talking about his plans for Disney World, he was exquisite in how he thought about designing the place to benefit the people that were coming to it.

But there's a lot of satisfaction in developing ideas into realities which become a part of Disneyland. So we'd like for you to see and enjoy them too.

You see a lot of that in the legacy of the park today. Everything from, you know, how the people are called cast members to the hiding away of trash cans to the things that the you know, the design of the buildings to trick the eye to make you think things were bigger or smaller than they actually were. Walt saw it as a place where adults and kids could come together to experience the wonders of life as a family. And notice he didn't say anything about wealthy adults or poor adults. It was just about everybody. And back then, the factory worker from Connecticut, he would get the same experience as the, uh, high-end banker from Manhattan. They would all just go through the same lines and do the same stuff. And it worked. Back then, everyman style stuff could be super profitable. And the theme parks, as the 2000s came along, were throwing off billions of dollars. But then in 2005, that's when things started to change. A man named Bob Iger came in as CEO.

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How America mostly judges CEOs these days is based on economic performance. And by any measure, Bob Iger is one of the most like Well, highest performing of those of all time. There's no argument around that. He demonstrated an ability to fundamentally understand how Disney could win, and that was around IP that really mattered to people. He bought Star Wars via Lucasfilm, Marvel, on and on. Billions of dollars invested in these properties that would be unique and beloved by Americans, which meant we'd be much more likely to be Disney customers. And it created an amazing flywheel, which is like this idea in business where one thing happens and that benefits another part of your business, and that thing happening benefits the first part and the things accelerates because each side helps itself. And in this case, Disney owning these IPs would bring more people to theme parks. People go to theme parks, they would love the IP more, whether it's Star Wars or other stuff. And that flywheel will cause them to go watch more movies. And you see how it all works. And it worked delightfully. By 2019, attendance at Disney World would peak at 58 million visitors. That's a lot of people. And if you go to the Orlando airport ever, you'll see what I mean. That place is a monstrosity because people come from all over. Flights to London, overseas, all this crazy stuff. It's become a worldwide destination. But along the way, Disney had started to realize something, which was the same thing folks who own high-end ski resorts like Vail and Aspen have figured out. For people that are going on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, they were willing to pay once-in-a-lifetime price. In 2019, Iger had promoted a guy named Bob Chapek to come in and run the parks. Bob was an operations and spreadsheet guy. If you've watched a lot on this channel, what happens when you hire an operations and spreadsheet guy? Uh, Well, I'll tell you what happens next. They start to run the parks and their business by spreadsheets rather than customer delight. They started to charge, do things like charge for hotel parking, raise prices across the board, uh, charge maintenance fees and all this kind of stuff, uh, that just totally went against what Walt had in mind for, uh, you know, a park for everybody. And while people would complain on social media or write nasty grams on the comment cards, they kept coming and they kept paying. And you could say, well, man, Chapek really sucked. But the reality was People like him who are executives in big corporations, they are a product of their environment. And Disney had bought all of these other properties, not just with stock money and stuff like that and cash on hand. They had bought it with debt, which meant financial pressure, the theme parks to keep generating a lot of cash. Behind the scenes, this was the era where Netflix was spending billions to try to build up a bank of intellectual property and shows that they would monetize through subscriptions. Disney was terrified. That's why they eventually launched Disney+ and bought all this stuff and brought it to market. Chapek was handed a bill that he had to pay, and that's all the nickel and diming that you saw, which is turning into the situation today at the parks. Then as we came into 2020, COVID would come, and that would have a weird side effect on the entirety of the Disney Parks business. In March 2020, Disney's parks closed for 4 months as the pandemic started. It was the first time they'd closed since opening. When they reopened, it happened gradually, so they could only bring in a limited number of people at a time. But they discovered something. They could charge those people a lot more money. And as an interesting side effect, fewer people in the park meant there was less wear and tear on the rides, less wear and tear on the infrastructure, and fewer staff that they need to have inside of the restaurants and, well, all the other stuff they did. COVID taught them that they could run a more elite park for the very wealthy and make a lot more profit. This is where you saw things like Genie+ and Lightning Lane come in. Things like FastPass, which used to be given to every guest. Well, now you had to pay extra for that stuff. Disney knew exactly what they were doing. Their CFO went on investor calls and described the strategy as yield over volume. And for those of you that don't speak business speak, that means we're going to charge people a lot more money and not worry about the people that are the poors. And originally, Disney World and Disneyland had been revolutionary because before that, carnivals, typically you had to pay per ride. And one of Disney's innovations was paying you one fee when you walk in the door, and then you didn't have to worry about money the rest of the day. Everything was included. Well, except for maybe the food. But, but that was a core idea that he understood why the park was so delightful. And here was Disney in the chasing of the almighty dollar, taking away that core of the experience and kind of forgetting what had made them great in the first place. If you make videos like I do in here, one of the psychological tricks that people know about is a thing called the peak-end rule. It's from a guy named Dan Kahneman. And basically, people don't remember the feelings that you gave them during the event, but they do really remember the feeling that you gave them at the end. And here was Disney basically giving you the middle finger throughout the entire day and on the way out the door. And these executives who had changed all that, they weren't stupid. They knew what they were doing. They were just forced to. The company structure and the debt load and the competition meant they had to chase the almighty dollar, and that meant coming out of your pocket. Made worse as they started to roll out a bunch of stuff specifically targeting the ultra wealthy. There's that special neighborhood that they've built inside of Walt Disney World where you can buy like an $8 million house. Like, come on, guys. At the same time, they've started to remove a lot of the special experiences and magic moments that people had when they were inside of the park. The character interactions and stuff like that, those are expensive. You gotta hire people to come in and wear those costumes. At the same time, it used to be a travesty when one of the rides would be down. Now it's pretty common for things like Guardians of the Galaxy and the different Star Wars stuff to be broken for weeks, if not months at a time. Fundamentally, Disney was setting themselves up to prioritize one thing, big flashy new rides that would bring in these high-ticket, high-dollar spenders. Meanwhile, the older rides that would appeal to more everyman-type folks and be part of the bigger experience, those are getting neglected. Because basically less maintenance being spent on them. They've gone into 2024, come out and publicly said that they have this yield over volume strategy. In other words, they're positioning Disney World as a luxury experience. Here's a problem though. Once you become a luxury brand and make that effort to go there, you do something that is like a one-way door. You can't go back from it, which is you leave the middle-class consumer behind and they leave you too. If you watch my Sears video or JCPenney on this channel, During their histories, they both tried to go up markets. They left their middle market customers behind, and those people, well, they were never available when those brands tried to come back. So here Disney is, totally trapped as a luxury brand that is frankly just pissing a lot of people off. The irony of this whole thing is I throw around the wealthy word pretty liberally in this video, but the reality is the super wealthy, they come in and book VIP tours. What this is really about is gouging upper middle class consumers who are sometimes taking out credit card debt to be able to afford a Disney vacation. In 2023 and 2024, an activist investor who has shown up a lot in this channel named Nelson Peltz had gone after Disney trying to get them to change things to make higher profits. And that even more reinforced the board into a position of thinking about quarter by quarter rather than the long term. And that's what you see in this whole thing. The structure around the decisions made that have turned Disney World into what it is today, that's not changing. But in 2025, things would start to get even worse for Disney World. And that was the opening of a new competitor across town. In May of last year, 2025, Universal Orlando opened a new set of theme parks called Epic Universe. It is the most ambitious new park opening in decades in Orlando, and it provides 5 different worlds, everything from Nintendo Universe to How to Train Your Dragon and some other stuff. But here's what's scary about this for Disney. This is targeted precisely at the types of customers that Disney World is leaving behind. People who treasure value over exclusivity. And it's working for Universal. In late 2024, Disney saw something that was kind of unprecedented in its history. 8 straight weeks of attendance declines at the park. But there's also something that's going to make all of this for Disney even worse in the coming decades. Well, in an era when all these executives who are making all this money now and these decisions and the board members, they will have long retired. But the reality is what parents are prioritizing is shifting compared to the era in which Disney had the golden years at Disney World. Millennials are the parents now, and whereas once they were taken to the park and had this delightful experience with their parents, today their kids are Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have grown up with Roblox and TikTok, uh, and suddenly they don't necessarily see the same value in going to visit these parks that their parents did when their baby boomers took them. Millennials, who should be a generation that immensely values experience and being part of a bigger cause, uh, and nostalgia for their childhood when they went to Disney World are feeling something different from Disney World, which is suddenly they feel extremely betrayed. And that's the core of all these social media posts. If you look at these videos and social media posts, it's not young people angered about the Disney World experience. It's millennials. This is a group who grew up wanting to be part of a tribe and a bigger thing. And here is Disney World actively pricing stuff in a way that makes them feel betrayed and left behind. And ultimately, that's why there's so many videos and why people are so mad. This isn't about prices. This is about the way Disney is making these people feel. This is creating a ticking time bomb underneath the parks. And the reality is you need 10-year-olds to go today in order to have that magical experience and want to bring their kids back 20 years from now. But if that flywheel stops, Disney World's going to be in trouble. By all spreadsheet measures, Disney World is totally killing it. Attendance is growing. Uh, they're making money. But at the same time, right, they're actively destroying their future. And that's the big problem. They've gone out and betrayed the core vision of what made Disney World great. An everyman's place to go where we were all the same, just Americans or foreign visitors. If you're that too, we welcome everybody. But here you see Disney's board thinking in short-termism and at the same time, the structure that they've created, forcing these executives to make decisions that are mortgaging the future for today's profits. And it's really easy to fall in the trap that they're in, which is, look, the time value of money means for each of us, whether emotionally or just in terms of raw numbers, money is worth more to each of us today than it is at some point in the future. Look, it's easy to fall into this trap. I've been there, and I think the only way to solve it is for you as an owner or you as an entrepreneur to not let it happen and keep the culture the right way, which is thinking about the long term so the business remains viable forever. And doesn't get into potentially generational decline, which is where Disney is. So I think when you watch a lot of these videos, um, or see social media posts and understand why people are complaining about these parks, behind it all, understand it's an emotional feeling of betrayal. That's why they're so angry. And to me, the why behind it, which is what this video is about, is so, so fascinating. It all comes down to the almighty dollar and the way you structure it. All right, that's it for Walt Disney World. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, drop me a comment below that said you liked it and encourages me to make more. See you next time.