Our topic today is going to be Walt Disney World (WDW) food service. Let's start with the positive news, shall we? If we take the very long view, we could report on things from several months ago, such as the addition of soda refill stations at Electric Umbrella, a highly customer friendly move that signals a real shift in thinking. Previously, the idea had been to make patrons buy sodas over and over, but this new station is tacit admission that customers don't want and don't need to do that at Epcot. After all, just across the courtyard is the all-you-can-drink Coca-Cola exhibit.

There are little changes here and there which lead to greater choices, like the ever-changing cart in the middle of Tomorrowland (which this last weekend featured hot wings), and the eggroll cart in Adventureland moving first away from turkey legs and back to eggrolls, and then adding corn dogs. Variety is always good.

And service is important. There was a major outcry when Pecos Bill's Tall Tale Café removed the free cheese sauce, due to Guests loading up on the freebies and not buying actual entrees, but the cheese sauce has now made a reappearance. Kudos to the local management for seeing the larger picture.

For purists, it's a good thing that McDonald's is moving out of the parks. In Orlando, most of the partnership remains intact, and McFries are still sold at the same venues they were before. But Restaurantosaurus has removed its McDonald's menu items. There are still burgers, fries, and nuggets offered, but they are not branded as McNuggets and they are standard Disney items now. Those who prefer the familiar taste of McDonald's may lament this change, but others will find it long overdue.

Still here in Epcot, but for how long?

But despite these bits of good news to report, not all is rosy in this magical realm. In fact, more things are wrong than right, when it comes to food service.

The best analogy I can invoke comes from television. Were you a fan of the TV show Seinfeld? There was one well-known episode featuring a chef who famously demanded strict decorum in his shop, or else this "soup nazi" would deny them his tasty food. "No soup for you!" he'd summarily declare in forceful terms, the very instant a customer would step out of line. Well, in recent weeks and months most of the food service at Walt Disney World (WDW) has taken a turn in this direction, especially from the perspective of a visitor who comes but once a year.

Of course, it's not occurring at the insistence of a nefarious head chef or even a single executive in the restaurants division--there is no soup nazi in Orlando--and it's not happening because the customers are doing anything wrong. But the fact remains that tiny subtractions here and there in the dining experience are cumulatively reducing the overall effect (not unlike the larger Declining by Degrees phenomenon).

Hot off the press comes this tidbit: in the United Kingdom, the free Disney Dining Plan (DDP) is back if you book between now until November 2008, with plans to travel between August 2, 2009 and October 3, 2009. That's a lot further away than Stateside visitors can book, but the odds are good we'll get a similar offer when things open up for us.

But read the fine print:

Yes, you read that right. The regular DDP is back, all right, but only if you stay at a Deluxe Resort. If you stay at a Moderate Resort, you only get the fast food version, the QSDP. And if you stay at a Value Resort, you get no free dining plan at all.

Not to say I told you so, but suspicion has been high that the advent of the Quick Service Dining Plan probably meant significant reductions to the free dining promotion.

Quietly a few weeks ago, WDW stripped many of its eateries of filet with nary a word of explanation. There was no apparent health scare in the quality of beef, and they continued serving hamburger, when on the menu, so this is unlikely to be a quality control issue. But anywhere there was filet, suddenly there was either sirloin or nothing at all. This has happened at Kona Café, Citricos, Captain's Grille, and Teppan Edo. Meanwhile, the prime rib entrees at several locations (Boma, Crystal Palace, Chef Mickey's) have turned into New York steaks. What gives?

Citrico's is high class. But no filet?

We could form a reasonable hypothesis by looking at the DDP. Filet is always among the most expensive dishes offered, if not the most expensive. But why would Disney want to take away the most expensive dish? Is it the economy? Are people cutting back on their spending and all that beef is going to waste in the restaurant refrigerators? I suppose that's a possibility, but there's a simpler answer: people on pre-paid dining plans are ordering the expensive steaks too often, and the plan isn't realizing as much cost savings as it could.

It takes but a thought experiment to see how this might work. If you've purchased the basic Disney Dining Plan (DDP), you get one table-service meal per day. At some fancier restaurants, you have to use two table-service credits, so you save up one from one day to use on your "big" meal. When the day arrives and you glance at the menu, you see that you could eat something like grilled chicken (for around $26). But why not go for the filet (usually $35), since it's pre-paid? It's human nature to want to maximize the savings.

Take the above example and extrapolate it for the thousands of visitors on the DDP per day, and you can see that WDW would be burning through steak filets a lot faster than would have been true a few years ago, before the DDP was introduced and people had to pay out of pocket. In essence, the DDP's very existence is giving the company an incentive to make the menus as homogenized as possible, with all menu items close in price to each other. From the customer point of view, it's a crying shame. The menus are losing their variety.

I can't say that I'm too surprised. This sort of thing has been occurring for some years now as the DDP becomes ever more firmly entrenched in the company's marketing and in the tourist imagination, and we've been warning about the DDP for years for just this reason. The cuts in quality are becoming more noticeable now, though, so perhaps consumers will soon reach their own breaking point.

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© 2008 Kevin Yee