Crisis and Entertainment

Economy recession has plunged thousand families in difficult financial situation, having to struggle between household duties and charges, loans reimbursement nightmare, fees for school and college for children…

After one year of this unpredictable cataclysm, I was wondering how entertainment business was facing the situation.

A nice opportunity to talk about this topic arose as my mother just came back from Orlando where she was for business. She told be about her trip and was absolutely surprised to see how transparent the crisis was for Disney business.

She said that the level of activity for the hotel was high – though several seemed to have reduced their rates to attract a larger range of people –, attractions were always full, and she had to queue up to get a table in restaurants.

She told me she witnessed a person buying for more than five hundreds dollars of gifts in a Disney shop. It is interesting to note, she said, that the lady who wanted to pay with credit card had to try different ones as they were all rejected probably due to limitations of credit.

Saying that, I wondered how this is possible. How people can still spend thousands of dollars while the situation and the future are still so uncertain.

My first assumption is that it may be a way for people to protect themselves from the moroseness. People save money for entertainment, probably reducing household expenses or delaying car purchase or the plan they had to remodel their bathroom or kitchen.

This is good for the entertainment business; nevertheless it is not a sign of recovery. Crisis is still there, though we start to see a slow down in the drop of economical indicators.

My mother brought me back some small gifts. It is interesting to note that all are manufactured in China – and therefore are manufactured for less than a dollar and however are sold for more that ten –. We have had a long conversation about that to finally agree to say that all the efforts developed by the United States to make the economy restart may finally result in helping countries such as China that product low cost goods. So we help these countries reactivating their economy first, before helping our own country.

I keep being reserved on how and when western countries will recover from the crisis.

I remain surprised to see how people seem to have reacted to the situation, as if they were ignoring it, and how some regions seem to not be affected by the crisis.

I hope they do that purposely and that it will help maintain a certain level of activity for the economy.