With Iger back in the driver’s seat, I’m wondering where the growth is going to come from. Did Iger squeeze out all the profitability before he left and put Chapek in? It is sort of like putting the fox back in charge of the chicken house. That fox should have “eased on down the road” instead of being a backseat driver.
I worked with a guy who spent years working for Disney. He said that the statement about working for Disney was, “If you’re not in on Sunday, don’t bother coming in on Monday.” To me that sounds like a recipe for a burnout culture. Many of the parks’ workers are barely surviving at the pay rates they receive.
The parks have been squeezing their customers really hard for a while now. You can only get so much juice from a desiccated orange. You pay really high park entry fees and still pay even more for a lot of the park’s benefits. Food and drinks are outrageous. A Disney store is at the end of every ride to dip into your wallet! Chapek was the Park’s guy so he has a good bit of responsibility for the current situation. I am now hearing a growing chorus of people complaining about the “nickel and diming” (actually $5 and $10). I even hear this from affluent folks now!
Streaming, while good, has many competitors. Disney is one of the strongest with all their content, but the cost is becoming untenable for many customers. The idea of streaming was to dump ever rising, expensive “cable” package! If you have two or three streaming services, you can now easily pay way more than a cable package.
ESPN is getting scrapped off the net by many younger people for free. Those folks aren’t going to be premium payors down the line! I spent time in the cable business and ESPN was always the highest cost channel for the cable companies to put in their lineup.
Disney has three movie production studios. Have they fully recovered after the COVID debacle? How much more can they charge for a movie? Once they get back to where they were before COVID, what’s going to drive growth?
I have a lot of questions about Disney’s future. I think they have suffered from too much growth. Too much growth can be just as bad as not enough growth. Like the three bears, too hot can be just as bad as too cold. I’m wondering if their hyper focus on growth under Iger resulting in them “killing the golden goose.” We’ll see…
Be smart, be well-read, be aware and be successful.
