For those saying to just raise wages, here’s the reality:
Wages are up 50-100% since pre-pandemic
Labor is by far the most expensive part of most service industries like DIS (though I haven’t checked their financials to confirm)
The cost of pretty much everything else has gone up a lot as well.
To respond, they can either cut back on positions (like the person who said his budget was cut from 14 to 8) of raise more revenue (
Genie+, higher ticket prices, no AP). There is no magic money tree here.
What about cutting mgt’s wages? It’s a drop in the bucket to redistribute to the rank and file. Make less profit? DIS is ultimately a publicly traded company. If they don’t satisfy the needs of the shareholders (the owners) their stock price goes down. We are living through a market correction. If they underperform their peers a lot it can go down so much that they go out of business. Or they won’t be able to fund new rides/experiences and people on the board will complain about how stale or worn it has become.
Someone is more than welcome to raise a bunch of money, take Disney private, and then operate it like a charity. But until then there are a lot of hard choices to be made and ultimately I’m glad they have chosen a path that keeps the parks open and functioning.
