DISNEY SAYS THE LAYOFFS ARE EXTREMELY PAINFUL. SO WAS THE TICKET. When I was a kid, my parents trusted one company without reading the fine print. If it said Disney on the box, it went in the VCR. No research, no screening, no checking a parents guide. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. The Lion King. My mother put them on and went to make dinner because she knew exactly what was coming out of that television. That trust was the most valuable asset the company ever owned. It was not the castle. It was not the mouse. It was a mother in a kitchen who did not have to check. Then they spent it. They decided the movies were a place to deliver messages instead of stories, and parents noticed. Even Bob Iger admitted in 2023 that the studio had lost sight of entertaining first. You do not usually get the CEO confessing. Then they priced the family out of the parks. This year, a single day at Magic Kingdom crossed 200 dollars for the first time in its 55 year history. Peak days hit 209. That is up roughly 38 percent since 2020. And waiting in line, the one thing that used to be free, became a product. FastPass cost nothing. It became Genie Plus at 15 dollars in 2021. Now the Multi Pass runs up to 45 a person at Magic Kingdom and the Premier Pass runs as high as 449. Four hundred and forty nine dollars. Per person. To skip lines at a park you already paid to enter. A family of four can spend more than 800 dollars on admission alone for one day, before a churro. Then they let ESPN and ABC drift. ESPN went from roughly 100 million homes in 2011 to about 55 million, and the answer was to raise the streaming price to 31.99. And now the president of the company says the layoffs are extremely painful. Three hundred more this week, mostly in HR and IT, after a thousand in April. She says technology set its sights on their business. No. Technology did not empty those park lines and those living rooms. The pricing did. The lectures did. The slow decision to treat the family as a wallet instead of a guest did. Every brand that tries this learns the same lesson. Bud Light offended the people who bought it and lost its spot as the best selling beer in America. Pepsi raised prices until people stopped buying the volume, and an activist investor showed up. Nike walked away from the stores its customers shopped in, chased margin, and watched the stock fall by more than half. McDonald's took out the playgrounds, raised the prices, and is now spending 8.5 billion dollars to figure out where the families went. Annoy your customers, price them out, and sell them something that offends the people who can still afford you. It ends the same way every single time. So here is the call. Your wallet is a vote and you cast it every week. Spend it with companies that remember who they work for. Be the mom in the kitchen again, just with more questions this time. They built that trust over sixty years. They can earn it back the same way they lost it. One family at a time. 🦋