McTronification

Tron, ten minutes of entertainment spread out over three hours. Go figure. Get a CLU. So much for critical thinking.

Had the additional honor of encountering the remodeled lobby at Downtown Disney. Taking lessons from the Starbuck’s reader. How to charge ten dollars for a cup of coffee. Put something alcoholic in it, of course. If I think about it, the idea seems absolutely preposterous. Ten dollars for coffee? What planet are you from?

But It’s incremental, like the drop of water argument in tort damages. Two-fifty for coffee. A lot, but okay, if you have to pay six or seven greenbacks (or Technicolor holobacks or whatever passes for dollars now), for a quart of popcorn that costs maybe a dime in its wholesale state, why not two-fifty for coffee? And if plain coffee can be two-fifty, why not six or so for something as exotic as a latte? Surely the qualitative value of a latte equals or exceeds a quart of popcorn. And if you charge three more dollars to add, not a shot, but a dollop of Irish whiskey, with tax you’re almost there, and everybody’s happy.

The whole arrangement of the lobby is an exercise in strategic marketing and profit maximization. What was previously a large open space has been subdivided like lots in a retirement development for efficient processing. Where you had a widely curving food service counter spread along a fair share of the periphery, the space has now been broken up into irregular specialty stations for a bar, other typical beverages including coffee, popcorn and nacho center, and the traditional theater food counter that now takes up about a tenth of its former territory. What used to impart a brief and deceptive yet rewarding sense of spacious elegance, has now been reduced to a typical rat maze of promotional entrapment, with the possible added bonus of at least increasing the take without increasing the staff, if not outright reduction of staff. Not that I would be surprised considering the source, but I somehow feel like one more little delusion of significance and independence for the masses has now been withdrawn and quite consciously commodified. They didn’t even bother to try and evoke any kind of ethnic or cultural charm in the design. Efficiency has met standardized taste in an ultimate McDisnification.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy