You know, usually there’s a way to defend Disney for some of their price hikes and monetary policies with the parks. Yes, you’re paying a ridiculous amount for Mickey ice cream bars you can buy at the grocery store for a quarter of the price, but inflation has a funny way of affecting things. Sure, having to pay en extra fee just to park at a hotel on Disney property and then another fee to park at a theme park parking lot is annoying… but they do have to keep those parking lots in tip-top shape, right? The story for you today is not like those, however. It’s just about impossible to defend Disney and Starbucks on this one. Let’s get to it:
In the It-Used-To-Be-Free division of news, the trenta ice water at Starbucks in the Magic Kingdom is no longer free. You can have ice water in a trenta cup, but it will cost you $3.99 +tax (they ring it up as tea). The small, red water cup is the only free option now. pic.twitter.com/qLsy3gS5sd
— TouringPlans (@TouringPlans) May 16, 2022
Yup, that’s Touring Plans informing all of us that apparently the Starbucks locations inside the Disney World theme parks are no longer allowed to give you ice water in any size other than the tiny red WDW cup that other restaurants use when giving away free water. That means that Starbucks is having to ring an ice water in at the register as an “iced tea custom,” which is actually false. I wonder what they would do if you contested this? I may have to try soon, though I’m hesitant to have security immediately make their way over to me.
By that logic, a treinta ice water is about four dollars, and we imagine that venti and grande sizes are about fifty cents less per drop-down in size. That’s just a rough estimate based on the cost of iced teas from Starbucks at the Walt Disney World theme parks.
Why Does Starbucks Water Taste So Good? — Quora
Here’s the thing about all of this: the ice waters from Starbucks were making Disney look bad. So rather than offer similarly high-quality water on tap at their locations, Disney seems to have just dictated that Starbucks can no longer operate the way Starbucks does everywhere else in the country. What is so remarkably doofus-level bad about this is that Disney World just happens to be in the middle of Florida, despite how badly some may want to move it. In case you’re not familiar with American climate patterns, Florida gets hot. It gets really hot. And five dollar Dasani water bottles are a lucrative venture when the heat index is triple digits. But does that make it a good decision that is likely to please customers? No. No, this is a brazen attempt to force guests to spend on lower quality water rather than get free, high quality H2O that Starbucks is known for.
Do better, Disney management. Seriously.
For all the news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place! As always, drop a comment down below and let us know where you plan to grab cold cups of water now that Starbucks is being nuked inside the parks.
