Disney World is proof the middle class is booming
Weather For Disney World: Opening the menu at the California Grill at Walt Disney World’s Contemporary Resort overlooking the Magic Kingdom, I expected to giggle at the affordability of everything. I’m a New Yorker. Nothing out here in the sticks costs as much as it does back home, right? Instead, I found $19 glasses of wine and a $75 rib-eye. If you’re a person of average means, a trip to Disney World could leave you Bippity-Boppity broke.
For upon |Disney World, that enchanted land of middle-class dreams, isn’t so middle-class anymore. So why is it more popular than ever? Fort Mickey is exhibited A for why “the dwindling middle class” has shrunk — because so many have moved up to the upper-middle and upper classes. Disney World is booming because America is booming. Weather For Disney World.
When Walt Disney World opened in 1971, ticket prices were roughly $20 in today’s dollars ($3.50 back then). In 2018, a single weekend day at the Magic Kingdom will cost you $129. Don’t worry, kiddies, for you it’s only $123. Parking is another $22. With plane fare, accommodation, meals, car rental, and so on, a family of four can expect to spend close to $5,000 for a week’s vacation, and that’s if you take it easy on the souvenirs. Weather For Disney World.
Disney World
All of those left-wing columnists who fret about one-percenters and inequality seem not to have noticed, but the way capitalism is showering wealth on this country is as spectacular as Disney’s nightly fireworks show. If you can afford to drop $700 to $1,000 a day on vacation, you’re doing well. And tens of millions of us are. This month at the Magic Kingdom, my family discovered routine two-hour wait times for both the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Peter Pan’s Flight. You can barely take three steps in any direction without bumping into a little kid racing along giddily to the next attraction. The fine-dining establishment in the fairy-tale castle, Cinderella’s Royal Table, where a bottle of Dom Perignon costs $320, has been booked up for months. Weather For Disney World.
Let’s reduce to a single figure what’s happened to American wealth: 28 percent. That’s the percentage of US households with a six-figure income, according to Mark J. Perry at the American Enterprise Institute. Adjusting for inflation so that all income is in the equivalent of 2016 dollars, that figure was 22 percent in 1997, 13 percent in 1977, and eight percent when Disney World was being built in 1967. The middle class ($35,000 to $100,000) and lower class (below $35,000) have shrunk because Americans are graduating from them. Naturally, there are a lot more of us today than there were in 1967, so consider this: we’ve gained more than 30 million well-off American households in 50 years. That’s more households than exist in California. Plus Texas. Plus New York State. Weather For Disney World.
Disney stands by ‘demand pricing’ for one-day park tickets
Never missing an opportunity to rail at the success of the free enterprise, the media have mangled this story. “How Theme Parks Like Disney World Left the Middle-Class Behind” read the headline of a fretful 2015 column in the Washington Post. Disney can ration its scarce commodity of space for visitors in only two ways: Time or money. If you charge people half as much and they only get to ride half as many rides because of the longer lines, how is that doing them a favor? If anything, judging by the generally overwhelming size of the crowds, Disney charges too little. Attendance at the Magic Kingdom hit a record 20.5 million visitors in 2015 and was just a hair below that in 2016. Disney World is simply reflecting the reality of the astonishing wealth-creation machine that is America.
Other countries really don’t compare. In 2015 real GDP per capita hit $56,000 in the US. Adjusted for purchasing power, that’s almost 20 percent more than Germany, almost 40 percent more than France or the UK, and nearly 50 percent more than Japan, where the purchasing power per capita is roughly on par with that of Mississippi. Weather For Disney World.
Disney is both a beneficiary and a generator of American wealth. Announcing Walt Disney World, whose creation he aided behind the scenes, Governor Haydon Burns declared November 15, 1965, to be “the most significant day in the history of Florida.” Swampy nowhere when Walt started secretly buying up huge parcels of land in the 1960s, greater Orlando is now the home of a $60 billion industry. Weather For Disney World.
When the novelist Ray Bradbury pitched the idea of running for mayor of Los Angeles to Walt, he said, “Why should I run for mayor when I am already king?” And a munificent king he was, creating joyous prosperity across all his domains.
The article was originally published here.
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