Lake Louisa State Park, Clermont, Florida
To Him Who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy – to the only God our Savior, be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen. ~ Jude 1:24-25
We left this morning at about 7:20am and drove for a bit in heavy fog. But it was really pretty!
Guess what?!?! We went back to Disney World today!
Read on to find out why. 😊
According to my own research done a few weeks ago, WDW employs 75,000 cast members (Staff). WOW! That’s a big payroll! And in 2016 there was a record 68 million guests! (We learned today that 2018 brought in 72 million!) And the entire park is built about 14’ above ground. The ‘utilidors’ (tunnels for cast members, etc. use to get from place to place) are actually on ground level and everything else was built above them. The utilidors also have things like trash removal, and cafeterias, dressing rooms and even a salon for Cast Member use. There’s also a full-service medical facility (doctors/pharmacy) at their disposal.
One cast member said, “It’s not all fun and games. You work long hours in all types of weather with guests who have high expectations.” Some begin work as early as 4:00am, and some don’t finish until 3:00am. On average, they make $10/hour or roughly $20,000/year. I was unable to discover if they have any benefits of any kind.
I found the following online at Quora.com, which is an answer to the training cast members receive. The response is from Carolina Garofani on January 6, 2016. (FYI – the total training time is a minimum of 2 weeks)
When you’re hired by Disney to go work at any parks, hotels or facilities you receive intense training that can last up to two weeks, more if your role is technical or managerial.
There’s a training day called Traditions.
It’s a full-day event that covers the origins and history of the Disney Company, and what’s expected of you when working for them. They talk about Walt, about how the parks were built, and what the Disney Spirit means and how everyone’s supposed to embody it, work with it and pass it on.
Then you sign a lot of papers (we used to joke we must have sold our soul to Mickey Mouse somewhere in those contracts), get your Cast Member ID and name tag, and you get a paper folder full of orientation leaflets: the Disney Look, the Disney Way, how you’re supposed to interact with guests, how you’re supposed to answer questions, what to do if you don’t know the answer to a question, how to act in an emergency (say a child that has dropped an ice cream cone or bag of popcorn), how far can you go to fix a bad situation, and so on. You’re required to read all of those.
After you get your costumes and go through specific training for your position – Cast Members who are supposed to talk in public have to memorize their spiels, people who are operating attractions get trained, and so on – you get a written assessment test to gather if you’ve actually internalized all those processes and attitudes.
In the end, it just gets to you.
You find a smile takes you a long way. It’s much easier to deal with an angry guest if you smile and are nice and polite to them to begin with – they relax and notice they’re dealing with someone who is actually there to help. The smiles come naturally after a while, you get really thick-skinned and for the rest of your life the first reaction to an angry customer will always be a smile.
It works.
Disney Magic!
More Fodor information:
Disney World offers several options for tours. Today, we splurged on the Backstage Magic Tour that lasted 6 ½ hours! (They advertise seven) There were 23 of us and we were divided into two groups, with tour guides Joey (ours) and Tiffani. Although we were divided, there was still plenty of times when we heard from the other guide. And Chuck drove us around all day in a large comfortable tour bus, with cold bottled water and bags of non-allergenic cookies at our disposal.
We met near Guest Relations outside of EPCOT, where our first pictures were taken (please allow 1-2 days).
No one is permitted to take pictures on this tour. It’s behind-the-scenes and they don’t want this stuff published on social media. It might paint an ugly picture of Disney and ruin the magic for the general public. But even in these behind-the-scenes places, there was nothing really ugly, although we did see one cigarette butt and were in a hallway that didn’t smell very good. Mostly, it’s just the things like the backs of the buildings, etc. that, while painted nicely, aren’t matched with the theme in their design. And we were in several warehouse-type buildings as well. I imagine there’s the privacy of the cast members to consider as well.
Since we weren’t allowed to take pictures today, they took pictures at four locations and said they’d send us a link to upload them in a day or two. And they did! So all the pictures you’ll see were taken by our guides, or pulled from Disney stock photos.
Our first stop took us behind the scenes of – –
1. The American Adventure in EPCOT’s World Showcase. Do you remember that from Thursday’s post?) Joey began pointing out the lengths Disney goes to in order to make everything perfect – including purchasing real antique bricks from Georgia to build the façade of this building, pointing out that all the flowers are red, white and blue and even the flower beds are designed in the shape of stars. Then there’s the clock tower. It has Roman numerals on the face, but the number four is different than we learned in school. It has four I’s (IIII) instead of IV. That’s because back in Colonial times (which is the setting here), that’s how they did it. They also built the land up higher here that any of the other country’s spaces, and centered it in the semi-circle of countries. And throughout Disney, you’ll find lots of American Flags but only one (I think) is the ‘official’ Old Glory. The rest are missing stars or a stripe. This is to give the illusion of patriotism without having to treat the flags with their due respect – like shining lights on them or taking them up and down every day, weather restrictions, orders for half mast, etc. And one other thing here at EPCOT, we learned that they start work at 6:30am to get ready for the 9pm light show here! Can you believe that? Every day, 365 days a year! We were given lots of other information, but today was a day of information overload with no ability to record it. Guess you’ll have to take the tour yourself if you want the full story. 😊
Behind-the-scenes here, also took us to the area where the show is made. A sort of behind the stage area and under the floor where we were shown how it works. The figures that pop up during the 30-minute show are on a huge sort of conveyor box that is about the length of ½ a football field. As each animatronic figure/set of figures are to be presented, the box moves back. When it starts out, it’s 50 yards under the audience! How many people does it take to make this happen? One. He pushes a button at show time and it runs itself. If it breaks down? There are 4-8 who make that repair happen. More details were shared, like the fact that one of the props contains bobby pins and clips, in order to make fast, temporary fixes to things like wigs and clothes. Oh. And the wigs are made from real hair on all the animatronics. Real people characters have synthetic wigs. So the fake people have real hair and the real people have fake hair. 😊
2. Creative Costuming is where all the clothing used in WDW is designed and made. No one wears uniforms, they’re all called costumes. Cast members who don’t wear a non-character costume (like those working in restaurants or keeping the parks clean) are allowed to take home up to five of their costumes at a time. They can wash them themselves at home, or they can allow extra time in their work day to pick up and/or return their costume and Disney will launder it free of charge. Each article of clothing is implanted with an RFI chip (like what was in our Magic Bands), so they can keep track of who has what.
Behind-the-scenes here was a walk around the sewing room and a look into the designer work area. They begin designing and making costumes 18 months in advance, and the sewing room is also responsible for repairs and replacements. The cast members here make the entire costume. There’s no “factory work” here. That gives them the ability to do different tasks and creates a better work environment through variety.
We also learned that Disney stocks over 5,000 types of fabric, and they’re the second largest manufacturer of staff “uniforms” in the US. (At least we think it was the US. Some of the stats they gave us were “in the world.) Number one is the military. Funny, because we never really thought about the fact that someone has to make all those military uniforms our service men and women wear!
3. The Central Shops building houses the build and repair area. It’s a huge building where they do repairs (like welding, and touch up paint, etc.), preventative maintenance (tightening nuts and bolts, oil changes, etc.) and cycle maintenance where they bring in things on a regular basis for a complete overhaul – checking for things like cracks by using dye, replacing “skin”, etc. and then testing and re-testing several times before it’s sent back into service. They also decide if it’s time to “retire” and re-make something. The tiniest detail is never overlooked. We personally noticed a ride car with a piece of tape on it that said to fix. We looked and there was a spot about the size of a quarter where some paint had come off.
4. Lunch was at the Whispering Canyon Café. It was all-you-can-eat family style service in the Fort Wilderness Lodge. We were served corn, green beans, baked beans, smashed potatoes, sausage links, ribs, pulled pork, chicken, cornbread, and fruit cobbler a la mode. Everything was good! Not as good as Boma, but good. Blaine was singled out once again and labeled a “trouble maker”, when he ordered lemonade. The servers did a lot of silly stuff here like that. One person at our table ordered Diet Coke and they brought her a teeny mason jar at first. There were people at our table who’d eaten here before and warned everyone not to order ketchup. Apparently someone(s) at another table that wasn’t part of our tour asked for ketchup because we saw a server with two elementary age kids. The kids were each carrying 3-4 bottles of ketchup back to their table. 😊
5. After lunch, we visited Textiles (a fancy word for laundry). They have five huge buildings and each one does a different type of laundry – Character Costumes, ‘uniform’ costumes, restaurant linens, and two different types of resort linens – the ultra delux and the delux. The only difference here being the thread count. And with the towels and linens, everything is white so there’s no chance of a dye problem. The strangest thing they ever discovered? A flat screen TV. It seems the TV repairman placed the broken TV in the bin housekeeping uses to put soiled linens in. It was empty at the time and he didn’t know better and he put the TV in there to keep it out of the way. Housekeeping came along with soiled linens, couldn’t see in the bin and dumped them in and continued dumping them in before finally taking them away. They found the TV when the linens were dumped out to be laundered! 😊 The most common thing found? TV remotes. That didn’t surprise me because when I did laundry for the sleep center I worked at, I used to find them on a fairly regular basis.
Disney World does approximately 2,400,000 pounds of laundry – – – each day! They told us that if you did your laundry every day for 8 hours a day, it would take you 72 years to do as much as Disney does in one day! They use 90 gallons of soap a day, and they’re the second largest laundry facility in the world. (We know this is world and not US 😊)
6. Last, but not least, was a visit to a small portion of Disney’s famed Utilidors. A Disney word for the “utility corridors”, that came about because Walt was in Disneyland and saw a cast member from Frontierland walking in their western garb heading for their break walking through Tomorrowland. He was not happy that it sort of broke the spell and messed with the ambiance he was trying to create. So he vowed to fix it for Disney World. The utilidors run underneath the Theme Parks. We visited Magic Kingdom’s. If you walk the entire loop, it’s 1.5 miles, plus the center corridor. All the pipes and wires run open along the ceiling, so if there’s a problem it’s easy (and unseen) for the maintenance crew to get to them. They also have an EVC system for their trash that runs at least a mile away. When they put the trash in, they also add ice. The trash and ice travel at 60mph. The ice helps facilitate movement of the trash and also helps clean out the pipes. In case you’re wondering, an EVC system is similar to the tube system your bank uses when you drive up. And speaking of trash, we learned why there’s trash cans everywhere. It because of another Walt observation. One day, he ordered Disneyland to hand out wrapped peppermints to guests as they entered the Park. He sat on a bench and watched people. He noted that if there was a trash can nearby, people would dispose of their wrappers properly. If not, they’d walk about 25’ and then discreetly let them drop from their hands onto the ground. So now, it’s mandatory. Trash cans every 25’ in every park. 😊
There are no pictures from here. . . .
A few other facts we remember: Disneyland in California would fit in the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom parking lot. Walt bought 95% of his 27,000 acres for $189/acre. Once word got out that he was the one buying the property, thanks to the intuition of a “fluff reporter” at the Orlando Sentinel, following her interview with Walt, the price skyrocketed to $83,000/acre!
It was a great day peaking behind the curtain!
On a personal note – – we walked 18 – 20,000 steps – – every single day we were in Walt Disney World! Gotta do something to walk off those scrumptious Dole Whips!
And now, other than hearing the fireworks at night, we’re officially done with Walt Disney World . . . until next time! Aren’t you glad?