Page 68 - The Disneyization of Society

HYBRID CONSUMPTION

The message from these various comments is clear. The goal of hybrid consumption
sites is to give people as many reasons as possible for staying at the sites. The more
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needs that can be met, the longer visitors will stay and the more money they will
spend. Also, there are more reasons for visiting them in the first place so that they
become destinations in their own right.

Hybrid Consumption at the Disney Theme Parks

Walt Disney realized at a very early stage that Disneyland had great potential as a
vehicle for selling food and various goods. Main Street USA typified this in that
its main purpose is not to house attractions but to act as a context for shopping.
As Umberto Eco puts it: ‘The Main Street façades are presented to us as toy houses
and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket,
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where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing’. Nowadays, the
Disney theme parks are full of shops and restaurants to the extent that many writers
argue that their main purpose increasingly is precisely the selling of a variety of
goods and food. The shops and restaurants are designed to merge seamlessly, in
terms of their theming and location, with the attractions. With many attractions,
visitors are forced to go through a shop containing relevant merchandise in order
to exit (for example, a shop containing Star Wars merchandise as one leaves the
Star Tours ride in the two American Disney parks and Disneyland Paris). In Epcot’s
World Showcase, representations of different nations are the main focus, but one
of the chief ways in which the nations and their nationhood is revealed is
through eating and shopping. Indeed, some of the buildings, which iconically
represent some of the countries, do not contain attractions at all (for example,
Britain and Italy), or perhaps contain little more than a film about the country
concerned (for example, Canada and France). However, each ‘country’ has at least
one restaurant (some, like France, Mexico and China, have two) and at least one
shop. It is not surprising, therefore, that many commentators portray Epcot and
indeed the other Disney parks as vehicles for selling goods and food. Thus, the
Euro Disneyland share prospectus presented as one of the main management
techniques associated with ‘the Disney theme park concept’ the fact that ‘Disney
has learned to optimise the mix of merchandise in stores within its theme parks,
which consequently are highly profitable and achieve some of the highest sales
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per square metre for retail stores in the United States’. If we add hotels into this
equation, the case for describing the parks as sites of hybrid consumption is even
more compelling.
At Disney World the number of hotels has grown enormously since Michael
Eisner took the helm at the Walt Disney Company in 1984. Eisner and his team
felt very strongly that this was one of several areas that needed attention. It was
felt that too many theme park visitors were staying off Disney property and that