When I first visited Disneyland in 1971, and in several subsequent visits during the next thirty years, I will admit that I generally enjoyed the experience. But my more recent visits have mostly been ordeals, and I am commited to never going to Disneyland again. Here are my reasons.

The Hassle of Getting There. Once, getting into Disneyland was easy: there was a large parking lot next to the park, with sections named for Disney characters, and you parked your car, walked to the entrance, purchased your tickets, and entered without any scrutiny. But the construction of the adjacent California Adventure park eliminated the nearby parking, so now you must park in a remote parking lot, take a long walk to where the shuttlebuses stop, get on a shuttlebus, get off, and take another long walk to the park entrance, where there is a long line to get in while employees check everyone’s purses and carry-ons to make sure that they aren’t bringing in any dangerous items – like inexpensive water bottles and snacks, which would mean that you wouldn’t be obliged to purchase the overpriced food and drinks offered in the park. Overall, once you get to Anaheim, you can anticipate that it will take at least thirty minutes to actually enter the park; and of course, the process of exiting the park and getting back to your car will take almost as long.

The Prices. It is true that Walt Disney was always interested in making money, and everything he did was aimed at achieving a profit. Yet that wasn’t the only thing that motivated him; he genuinely enjoyed providing people with wholesome entertainment at a reasonable cost, and in his second-floor apartment on Main Street, he relished looking down on the appreciative guests. At times, I am told, he would go down to anonymously mingle with the crowds having a good time. However, I am reasonably sure that none of the current Disney executives ever visit Walt Disney’s apartment for the heartening experience of observing the happy guests; to them, the attendees at Disneyland are simply statistics: typical family a, b, c, and d are currently spending only x amount of dollars on each visit, and we must figure out ways to get them to spend x + y dollars.

So, in the first place, the price of admission has skyrocketed, and it keeps going up all the time. The explanation is always the cost of adding new rides, but given the expense of maintaining all the existing rides, creating and maintaining another one could not significantly increase the Disneyland budget. So, Disney has the causality reversed: they aren’t raising prices because of the new rides, but rather they are adding new rides to justifying raising prices.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when inside the park, I don’t recall feeling ripped off by purchases; yes, the prices were higher than what you would find outside the park, but not outrageously so. That is no longer the case. When I am thirsty, being offered ridiculously expensive bottles of water, I instead started going to the water fountains, even though the water is never cold, to better encourage you to buy their expensive chilled beverages. I think the accountants’ philosophy is that when you have a captive audience, you can charge anything you like, and whenever they experience a decline in attendance, their solution is never to lower prices, but rather to add a new attraction and eventually raise prices even further.

I distinctly recall one of Disneyland’s most egregious buck hustles: “Disney Dollars.” So, you could exchange your hard-earned cash for colorful pieces of paper featuring Disney characters, and you could have the “fun” of spending them for food and merchandise while in the park. (The concept that it is wildly more enjoyable to purchase something with a bill featuring Goofy instead of a bill featuring Andrew Jackson never made any sense to me.) Then, at the end of the day, you could exchange your Disney Dollars for real money, or keep them as “souvenirs.” So, to explicate this scheme: Disney was selling you items worth almost nothing; as if realizing that this was indefensible, they were always willing to give you your money back; but they were secretly hoping that you would neglect to do so, either due to forgetfulness or an idiotic desire to retain “souvenirs,” enabling them to profit.

I also object to the increasingly common practice of forcing guests who exit a ride to walk through a gift store filled with ridiculously expensive items related to that ride. People should be obliged to enter a gift store only if they are interested in purchasing something; requiring them to do so is an obviously cynical policy based on the hope that some parent might be tempted to impulsively purchase an item for their child that they otherwise never would have considered.

The Indifference to Older Guests. It often gets hot in southern California, and one would think that a caring park would include a lot of chairs and benches in the shade where people, especially older people, could relax and cool off. But good luck to anyone seeking out such a place in Disneyland. Yes, there are plenty of benches, but almost none of them are in the shade, and the few that are shaded invariably are occupied; on one especially hot day, I was feeling a need to sit down and rest, but my wife could not find anyplace to do so in the shade. Again, this is a matter of intentional design: people who are relaxing on a bench are not spending money; if they are forced to move around, they might be tempted to buy a snow cone or enter a gift store. Also, the benches are never particularly comfortable, even though it would be easy and inexpensive to upgrade them; but again, Disney executives simply do not want their guests to remain sitting for very long.

It is also significant that there are never any awnings over the interminably long lines outside certain Disney attractions, and while there have been a few efforts to entertain guests in a line, such as the amusing tombstones outside the Haunted Mansion, most lines offer no entertainment at all. Again, all of this is deliberate, because Disneyland wants you to purchase their options of bypassing the lines. Bluntly, people are deliberately being forced to suffer in boredom because the park wants to make more money.

And Disneyland increasingly requires the use of smartphones to expeditiously secure places on rides or make dinner reservations, which effectively disenfranchises older guests who are less skilled with smartphones. In our recent visits, we depended upon our tech-savvy son-in-law to deal with these issues, but not every older guest can command the services of a younger relative.

Overall, it seems clear to me that Disney executives are simply not interested in appealing to older guests, who are typically less likely to spend a lot of money at the park.

The Elimination or Modification of Rides. I do not believe in rigidly clinging to the past, and I will admit that some of the changes Disneyland has made over the years should be celebrated, like eliminating the wretched Bear Country Jamboree and revamping Splash Mountain to remove references to the racist movie Song of the South (1946). But I regret most of the other changes, particularly the removal of what was my favorite Disneyland ride, Monsanto Inner Space, a well-designed and conceptually interesting ride in which riders gradually found themselves shrinking to eventually enter a microscopic world. It was torn down and replaced with Star Tours, in which people sit in chairs which slightly move in a pathetic attempt to persuade them to feel like they are traveling through space. I went on it once, hated it, and have never gone again. (When I go on a ride, I want to actually move around – not sit in a chair that slightly shifts position to simulate movement. This is also why I hated another similar ride that nobody misses, Mission to the Moon, later Mission to Mars.)

I also enjoyed the Carousel of Progress, which slowly rotated guests as they viewed the kitchens of the past, present, and future; it was relaxing and inoffensive if not compelling entertainment. But it was replaced by America Sings, an uninspired celebration of American music, before the whole building was torn down. Another fascinating attraction was the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, showing the ingenious ways in which the castaways employed objects in their island environment to assist in their everyday lives; it was unfortunately changed to Tarzan’s Treehouse, to promote the animated movie, with all of the interesting aspects of the exhibit removed. Disneyland also likes to temporarily modify some rides to promote other films, and while the alterations to Space Mountain, retitled Hyperspace Mountain to incorporate Star Wars references, are inoffensive, the modifications to the Haunted Mansion to connect it with The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) definitely weakened the ride’s impact.

More broadly, it’s true that Disneyland has always included some rides based on Disney films, but the park also created enjoyable rides that were unrelated to any films, like the classic Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, it seems that every new ride is designed in part to promote a Disney film, and if an existing ride can’t be rebranded to refer to a film, the company will occasionally create a film based on that ride – sometimes successfully (Pirates of the Caribbean), sometimes less successfully (Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise). And of course, every ride now generates overpriced merchandise sold in stores adjacent to or nearby these rides. As the analysts would say, it is all a matter of “synergy,” getting people to ride the ride, see the film, and buy the toys.

The Terrible Vegetarian Food.  Every Disneyland eatery dutifully includes a “vegetarian option,” but in my years of being a vegetarian, I have only encountered one dish that was reasonably palatable – a veggie burger at a fast-casual restaurant where you stood in line to get your food and took it to a table. But thanks to the generosity of my sister, I have eaten in some of Disneyland’s finest restaurants, and the offerings I was served ranged from barely tolerable to absolutely inedible.

I recall one time when the dish I received was so awful that I literally could not eat it, even though I was hungry; a server noticed that I wasn’t eating, I explained the situation, and she offered to bring me another vegetarian entrée, which was only slightly better, but I was able to eat it. The server also remarked that a number of other guests had complained about my original order, which raises the questions: if customers are regularly complaining about a certain dish, why has it remained on the menu? The answer is simple: Disneyland simply doesn’t care about vegetarians, probably viewing them as annoyances who won’t order their more expensive meat-filled entrées. So, the chefs work very hard to produce delicious food for carnivores, and seemingly relegate the task of creating a “vegetarian option” to inexperienced underlings who spend a few minutes throwing them together without any concerns about whether it actually tastes good.

So, if there is a unifying theme to all of these complaints: Walt Disney himself balanced a reasonable concern for making money with some genuine altruism; I feel that he wanted people from all income levels to be able to visit his park and have a good time. Today, Disneyland displays no altruism at all; the park is all about making money, and finding more and more ways to make money, and they are perfectly willing to discourage poorer guests and older guests from attending the park in order to pursue profits from young people with lots of spending money. And I for one no longer want to contribute to filling their overstuffed coffers in exchange for some moments of pleasure.

Hello. This is the New World of Westfahl website, replacing the earlier one that became inactive in 2017. It has now been removed from the Internet, though all of its contents are still available by means of the Internet Archive at

https://web.archive.org/web/20241218083753/http://www.sfsite.com/gary/intro.htm

This website will be less ambitious, since I no longer enjoy the services of the late Rodger Turner to maintain such an elaborate website, but I will be providing information about myself, news, occasional articles, a blog, and contact information.

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On Vegetarianism

While I await guidance from my wife and daughter about what sorts of topics I might be permitted to address, I will talk about the presumably unproblematic issue of vegetarianism.

As we all know, everyone has different preferences about the food they eat, and this is normally accepted without any complaints. Some people love broccoli; some people hate broccoli. But if there is a report indicating that sales of broccoli are declining, those who hate broccoli do not write articles celebrating that news and gleefully anticipating that eating broccoli thankfully is finally going out of style.

Things are quite different regarding my own preference in eating, namely, vegetarianism.

In recent years, I have read several articles about how the company Beyond Meat is having financial difficulties, how a few vegan restaurants struggling to survive have reintroduced meat into their menus, and how vegetarian meat substitutes are more expensive than comparable meats. All of this indicates, to the authors of these articles, that the fad of vegetarianism is obviously coming to an end, and everybody will go back to consuming meat as part of their diets.

And this is absolutely idiotic.

First, vegetarianism is not a “fad.” For millennia, the subcontinent of India has largely been devoted to a vegetarian diet, and Buddhism also promotes vegetarianism; so in 2003 while attending a conference in Hong Kong, a Buddhist temple served me a delicious meal which only had persuasive plant-based substitutes for meat. One company specializing in canned meat substitutes, Loma Linda, was founded over 100 years ago and is still going strong. Vegetarianism has long been practiced by many people, notoriously including Adolf Hitler. When I was at Carleton College in the 1970s, one of the cafeterias serving students offered a menu of vegetarian food for the many students who wanted it. Perhaps vegetarianism has received more publicity in recent years, but it is also a venerable tradition that cannot be properly described as a “fad.”

Second, so what if one company specializing in vegetarian meat substitutes is experiencing some financial challenges? For the record, Beyond Meat has remained in business and its products are still available in grocery stores, like their delicious Beyond Steak. And today, there are several other companies selling vegetarian meat substitutes, and the rest of them all seem to be doing fine. In the 1970s, the Chrysler Corporation almost went out of business; but nobody wrote any articles saying that “Gee, I guess people are going to stop buying cars.”

Third: regarding restaurants, today it is true that most restaurants nowadays will offer “vegetarian options,” but this was not always the case. I was once in a restaurant with my daughter, the first member of my family to become a vegetarian, and she complained to the waiter that there was nothing on the menu that she could eat; he volunteered to have the chef prepare a special dish that did not contain meat. In my own experience in one restaurant, facing no viable options, I was forced to advise the waitress to have the chef prepare a special version of one dish that omitted the meat. And in such restaurants, one cannot be sure that food is being prepared without contamination from meat products, a concern for all dedicated vegetarians. Dealing with these realities, most vegetarians long ago realized that they were better off preparing their own meals without relying on restaurants; there have also emerged several companies such as Amy’s that offer in grocery stores any number of frozen entrees that can be heated up in the microwave. So, on days when I don’t feel like cooking, I can eat Amy’s outstanding cheese enchiladas as an alternative to going to or ordering food from a restaurant. So, vegetarians have largely learned to live without restaurants, explaining why restaurants catering to them might be experiencing difficulties.

Finally, to address the notion that the higher cost of vegetarian meat will drive consumers back to meat: I invite anyone to examine the ever-expanding shelves in the produce section of grocery stores with “organic” produce, grown without exposure to pesticides or other chemicals. These fruits and vegetables are invariably more expensive than those in the regular sections; yet people happily purchase them despite the higher prices. Why? Because they think that organic produce is healthier than regular produce – which is precisely why vegetarians will continue to buy meat substitutes instead of real meat. I would never in a million years go back to buying regular ground beef instead of vegetarian substitutes simply because I might save a dollar by doing so, knowing that red meat is not a healthy option.

So, the question is: why don’t people simply accept the fact that many people choose to become vegetarians? Why do they keep writing articles falsely suggesting that vegetarianism is dying out and that everyone will soon go back to consuming meat on a regular basis? The answer is simple: the carnivores know that the vegetarians are right, and they are wrong, and they can’t stand it.

They know that meat – especially red meat – is hazardous to one’s health. They know that it is inherently immoral to raise animals for the sole purpose of killing them and eating them. They know that the process of producing such meat requires a disproportionate amount of the resources of our imperiled planet, and is harmful to the environment in many ways, in contrast to the economical and benign process of growing and processing plants to serve as meat substitutes. But they are addicted to being carnivores, and in the manner of all addicts they want other people to share their addiction and to ignore the harmful effects of their addiction.

Thankfully, they are not going to win the lame arguments that they are making. People who have chosen to become vegetarians will remain vegetarians, and I am confident that there will be increasing numbers of people who will recognize the logic and morality of abandoning meat and join their ranks.