Prices at Walt Disney World are going up while services seem to be going down. You can read about Disney running out of packaging and putting high-cost items in plastic bags now, or how they are charging for drinks at a hotel experience that already costs $6,000 for two nights, or that they’re nickel and diming guests to death. Those are all recent articles from this website, That Park Place, where we clearly want Disney World and other theme parks to succeed. Yet if you haven’t been to Walt Disney World in the last few years, you likely have no idea just how bad things have gotten when it comes to milking their customers for every penny they can. We’re not exaggerating when our writers say that it’s getting bad.
The latest change — and by the way, these changes happen about every week now — is that Disney World is jacking up the prices on their food items and drinks. You can say that this is all due to inflation, and that might be partly be true. But there are some egregious changes here that need to be called out. According to WDW News Today, Walt Disney World is now charging five dollars for a bottle of Coca-Cola in their parks. Now I can deal with the twenty-dollar cheapskate spaghetti and the fifty-cent increases in pizzas is “whatever,” but charging people five dollars for a bottle of soda in the Florida summer heat? C’mon. C’mon.
Yes, I know it’s been ridiculously expensive to buy a soft drink at Disney and other Florida theme parks for a while. But five dollars is highway robbery. It’s the one thing where there’s absolutely no way that inflation is the culprit. They want to sneak in a price increase for a bottle of soda that costs (at most) twenty-five cents to produce. Disney is then wanting to sell that at a twenty-fold upcharge. Twenty-fold.
We can talk about the price of cheap noodles another time, I just can’t believe they’re going to charge five-dollars for a bottle of soda and pretend it’s inflation.
Pretty much everyone who works for this website loves the Disney Parks, but it’s time to start calling this stuff out. These changes are going to give the parks a horrible reputation, reduce the experience of going, and drive consumers away. We’re already starting to see that with Disney offering discounts for hotels in the spring and summer to try to pull in guests.
