“Why, in my day, you could go to Disneyland for 50 cents!”
Since 1955, theme park fans have paid obsessive attention to the cost of admission to the Happiest Place on Earth. Critics assail The Walt Disney Company for raising prices consistently at the world’s original theme park (as well as its counterparts around the world). The problem with such critiques is that they’re always a bit disingenuous. Prices are never stagnant on any product. Yes, someone could purchase a ticket to Disneyland on opening day for only 50 cents, but they could also buy a Cadillac for $3,977. An entire house cost $22,000 on average. A hamburger and fries at McDonald’s cost a quarter. And the Disneyland price is a bit misleading. I’ll explain why in a moment.
Rather than take shots at Disney for constantly raising prices at their theme parks, let’s take this opportunity to explore how admission pricing has evolved over the years. How has it compared to the price of inflation? Are Disneyland increases in line with the cost of other products? How much of what we say in frustration regarding the price of admission is fair and how much is unfair venting? It’s a controversial topic, and the battle lines tend to become intransigent and hostile. Let’s remove some of the emotion from the discussion, taking a more analytical approach. Here’s my analytical evaluation of the price of admission at Disney theme parks over the years.
You didn’t walk ten miles uphill in the snow, grandpa
Image: Disney
Let’s start with the lie posted above. Okay, lie is a bit harsh, so we’ll call it a mistruth. Yes, you technically could get into Disneyland on opening day for 50 cents. The catch is that you had to be a child to do so. Anybody whose ticket cost half a dollar didn’t pay. Their parents ponied up instead. Then again, given what transpired on opening day at Disneyland, odds are better that the person telling that story snuck in for free instead.
Perhaps we should focus on full price admission in 1955 instead. Adults paid a dollar to get in, and if that’s all they paid, they quickly grew bored. Each of 35 rides available on opening day came with a hidden cost. If you wanted to ride an attraction, you had to pay 25 to 35 cents per adult and 10 to 25 cents per child. So, the 50 cents or a dollar that bought access to Disneyland didn’t come with any additional access to the entertainment inside.
How much would a full day at Disneyland have cost? Let’s presume that a family with two parents and one child attended. If they wanted to enjoy every epic new attraction onsite, the grown-ups would have paid $8.70 each while the child would have cost an additional $5.15. That’s a grand total of $22.55 or just a touch over $7.50 per person. It’s a far cry from 50 cents. It’s also a factor of 7.5 larger than the dollar admission price. In practical terms, a day at Disneyland in 1955 cost $7.50 on average for a family but was $1.20 higher for adults.
Kids do NOT get in free at Disneyland
Let’s get ahead of ourselves just a bit and skip to the end of the page here. Single-day admission to Disneyland costs $95 during the offseason in 2016. That’s the absolute lowest price someone can pay for a single day at the park. Disney’s recent introduction of surge pricing muddies the picture a bit since Peak Season pricing spikes to $119, a 25 percent increase. So, we’ll perform high and low evaluations for comparison.
For children, the applicable numbers are $89 during the offseason and $99 during the Peak Season.
One conclusion you can already draw from the data is that Disney doesn’t discount children’s tickets the way that they did in 1955. They used to cost half as much for admission and had a realistic discount of roughly 40 percent including attraction costs. Today, parents save a feeble six dollars on the cost of offseason park admission and 20 percent during Peak Season.
The math here is fascinating. The American CPI adjustment calculator indicates that a dollar in 1955 is the equivalent of $8.99 in 2016 numbers. Rather than round up, we’ll use the precise totals so that nobody can claim that rounding was used to cook the books. Using this pricing data, that 50-cent ticket in 1955 is the same as a $4.50 cost today, which is cheaper than any movie ticket you can purchase in 2016. As indicated previously, that’s misleading, though. An admission ticket for the first year of Disneyland meant that a child could walk in the gates and do virtually nothing else.
What we want to do is compare apples to apples. That means admission with the practical benefits of a full day of park exploration. As previously indicated, if the child rode everything, they spent $5.15 in 1955. That’s $46.28 today. We can now draw a second conclusion based in fact. Disney has effectively doubled the cost of a child’s admission over the past 61 years. The numbers go up or down a bit depending on whether we use $89 or $99 as the baseline, but it’s fair to say that if we split the difference at $94, it’s a 102 percent price increase over time.
The low cost of puberty
Image: Disney
Have adults suffered the same kind of gradual sticker shock? Obviously, a dollar then is $8.99 today. In 2016 terms, an adult could only buy an app for the same price as they could have entered Disney back in the day. It’s not even enough to buy a Disney digital movie. Those generally run $17.99 to $19.99.
The average movie ticket price in 2016 is (allegedly) about $8.75, so an adult theoretically COULD watch Star Wars: Rogue One at the theater for the same amount they used to pay for Disneyland. Rogue One wouldn’t be in 3D and it certainly wouldn’t be an IMAX experience at that price, though. Instead, a person would be going to a matinee showing. And what this ancillary discussion proves more than anything is that you should never believe what the movie industry says about average ticket prices.
Should an adult have wanted the full opening day experience at Disneyland, they’d have paid $8.70. That’s the equivalent of $78.19 today. You can already see where I’m going with this. While the price of admission for children has spiked over the past six decades, it hasn’t increased as much as you might expect for grown-ups. Offseason pricing of $95 for single day admission to Disneyland in 2016 is only 21 percent more than in 1955. Even if we use the Peak Season price of $119, it’s still only a 52 percent increase over 61 years.
Why is that reasonable?
I’ll have a burger, medium fries, a Cadillac, and three-bedroom rancher
Image: Disney
Let’s circle back to the examples I mentioned earlier. That Cadillac that cost $3,977 in 1955 would be $35,741.51. This analogy is a bit difficult to perform accurately since countless Cadillac models exist. Also, the price each individual receives depends on their negotiating ability and the decency of their local dealer.
Let’s do the best that we can with the comparison. TrueCar.com indicates that the most popular model in the line, the CTS Sedan, has an average price of $46,854. Only one vehicle in the Cadillac fleet has a TrueCar price less than $35,741.51. And since Cadillacs were also considered the pride of Detroit, we should compare a luxury vehicle from 1955 to one today.
That’s the Escalade, which TrueCar considers to have a fair price of $79,943. Picking virtually any model, Cadillacs have increased beyond the price of inflation since 1955. Comparing apples to apples as best I can, the luxury Cadillac has increased 123 percent. That’s slightly beyond the cost of children’s admission to Disneyland over time and quite a bit more than adult tickets during the same interval.
Also, I want to stress that I’m not picking data points that I know have a definite conclusion. I’m performing the calculations and evaluating the results in real time. I’m completely shocked that the Cadillac comparison is that linear with Disneyland admission prices.
Ray Kroc was a genius…and Walt Disney’s World War I buddy!
Let’s see how well McDonald’s measures up. According to SecretMenus.com, a hamburger cost $1.29 in 2016. As you know, fries come in tiers today, which wasn’t an established concept back in the days of Ray Kroc. Today, an order of small fries costs $1.19, medium fries are $1.79, and large fries are $2.19. I’m going to use medium fries initially. That brings the price of a hamburger and fries up to $3.08 in 2016.
As a reminder, the same “meal” cost 25 cents in 1955. That’s the equivalent of $2.25 today. That’s an increase of 32 percent beyond the price of inflation. Had we used small fries instead, the total would be $2.48. We’d be discussing an increase of only 23 cents over time, a change of less than 10 percent over 61 years. McDonald’s remains a great value…although if I did some calorie calculations, you’d feel differently.
I’ve saved the cost of a house until the end because it’s the bloodiest calculation. The housing market fluctuates so dramatically between markets that using a single pricing average feels intellectually dishonest. I’m going to bite the bullet here and pick a single source for this data. YCharts research suggests that the average purchase price of a home in 2016 is $231,025. Adjusting the 1955 average of $22,000 for inflation, it’s the same as $197,715 today. The housing market has maintained stability over the years, with a total increase of less than 17 percent over the past 61 years.
A dollar today vs. a dollar, well, 61 years ago today
All of these are comparisons for other products that were popular in 1955. The most important stat, however, is average household salary in 1955 vs today. After all, Disney SHOULD charge more if consumers have more money. It’s corporate malfeasance to do otherwise. The problem with this particular calculation is that the 1955 data is shaky. Some government sources cite $5,000 as the average income. A few state that $4,400 is correct. And the only precise figure I’ve found is $4,137. That’s a huuuuuge variance, as $5,000 is more than 20 percent higher $4,137. As such, I’m going to have to run the calculations three times to account for all possibilities.
The lowest annual household income for 1955 is $4,137, which is the equivalent of $37,719.44. Using the $4,400 number, we’re talking about $39,543.03. And the highest possible amount, $5,000, still inflation adjusts to only $44,935.26. According to the most recent numbers, the current average American household income is $55,775. Using any of the suggested values for 1955, the average household is doing better in 2016 than they were during the mid-50s.
The catch from the Disney perspective is that families aren’t doing a lot better. I’ll be honest that this surprises me in an era of two household incomes rather than one. At best, average family take-home pay has increased 48 percent since 1955. At worst, we’re up 24 percent. That’s an uncomfortably large range for a statistician, but I’m inclined to use the median total of $4,400. That gives us a 41 percent overall increase over the past 61 years. It also allows for a reasonable conclusion.
Disneyland ticket prices have gradually risen between 21 and 52 percent, depending on calendar period when you visit (this whole piece would have been much easier to calculate in the days before surge pricing). My assessment of the situation is that Disneyland ticket prices are 34 percent higher than the standard cost of living increase over the past 61 years. We’ll use that number as a general rule of thumb.
During the same timeframe, the average American household is taking home approximately 41 percent more income. What we can determine from this data is that the cost of Disney ticket prices is expanding at an appropriate rate relative to the overall state of the American economy. I, too, am surprised by this revelation. (Editor’s note: Particularly as the number, and quality, of attractions in the park has expanded significantly since 1955). The only catch is that Disney no longer discounts for children the way they did when Uncle Walt was running the show back in 1955.
