I Might Just be Getting Cynical

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A couple of years ago, I bought my husband a sweatshirt at JCPenney.  It was on sale, and curious to know how much of a discount I got, I removed all of the sale stickers when I got home to reveal the original price.  You can imagine how irked I was when I saw that the original price was lower than the price that was showing the tag.  They had marked the price up, in order to put it on sale and make me feel like I was getting a deal.  Needless to say, I was angry.

I mention this because I feel almost as though Disney is currently doing something similar.  They recently announced that adult ticket prices were going up $3 (from $79 to $82 per day), and a child’s ticket would increase $6 (from $68 to $74).  That’s a 3.8% increase on adult tickets and an 8.8% increase on a child’s ticket!

Of course, to remove this unpalatable taste from our mouths, Disney almost immediately announced some discounts for next year.  There’s a Free Dining offer for select dates 10/01/10 – 09/29/11, a $500 gift card option for qualifying bookings during selected times between October 2010 and February 2011, and even some room-only offers.  This leads me to wonder: did Disney raise their prices specifically so that they could try to lure people with new discounts?  Or did they offer the discounts to distract us from the price increases?

On the other hand, it’s very possible that this is just a “cost of doing business” sort of thing, and I’m reading too much into it.  That said, I didn’t get an 8.8% raise this year, or even a 3.8% raise; did you?  Do you think Disney is pulling a “JCPenney”, or do you think these are totally unrelated stories?  Let me know at http://www.facebook.com/disneygene!