Jobs I've Had Part III: Mickey's Character Shop

The summer after my sophomore year, fresh off the RA gig, I returned home to live with my parents in Orlando for the first time since I had gone off to college (on account of having stayed and taken classes the previous summer.) I needed to find a job, and as every kid in Orlando knows, working at Disney is the easiest option because they are always hiring for the summer and they pay better than everyone else. I applied, interviewed, and was hired to work at the largest store on Disney property: Mickey's Character Shop.

Disney has a college internship program where college students come to Orlando and live in Disney dorms, work at Disney, and receive college credit. Hundreds of college students do this every year, and the Character Shop had at least 20 from various states. There were also several people like me who lived in Orlando and were home from college for the summer, so we had a good sized college crew. The rest of the staff was mostly people in their 40's and older, who had been working at Disney for years. It was a strange split between the two groups, and the college students all tended to stick together and go out drinking after work, while the "lifers" went home to families and regular life. Because every Disney employee has a pass to get into the parks whenever they want, on a lot of nights we would go next door to Pleasure Island and go clubbing, or we'd head to one of the parks for the last hour it was open and ride a couple rides before they shut down.

I worked as a cashier and stockperson, and it's tough to say which of those roles was worse. As a cashier you would see an endless stream of tourists buying crap and often wanting you to ship it for them back to whatever country they lived in. Disney offers impeccable customer service, but in so doing they make life extremely difficult for their employees. If a "guest," as we were always instructed to call them, wanted to buy several thousand dollars worth of tacky breakable crap and ship it to Timbuktu, I had to make all the shipping arrangements at the register and then take their haul to the back and spend hours packaging it all carefully. Or if a guest was staying on property (in one of the Disney hotels, as opposed to a nearby chain hotel not affiliated with Disney), they had the option to have everything they bought in any park or store on property sent back to their rooms at no charge. People who shop their way through Disney World, having little packages of crap shipped to their room at each stop. This also could take hours to accomplish.

Stocking was just as physically difficult as cashiering was annoying. During the high tourist season, the store would be picked to the bone in just hours unless it was constantly re-stocked by the employees. We were supposed to have every stuffed animal arranged neatly, and yet children would climb into the bins of stuffed animals, throw them everywhere, and leave it looking like a plushie bomb had gone off. I would often spend an hour rearranging the massive stuffed animal display in the middle of the store, only to go in the back to get more stock and come back to find it destroyed all over again. Between the shopping hordes taking all of the merchandise and the children messing up our displays, a stocking shift was eight straight hours of physical madness. But at least the time passed more quickly than at the cash register.

Occasionally I was called upon to work the jewelry or watch counter, which involved showing customers a specific watch or piece of jewelry in the case. We were constantly counseled to be vigilant about shoplifters, and the stores always had security personnel dressed as tourists who watched for signs of shoplifting. It became infuriating, however, because even when a customer was very likely shoplifting, the company was loathe to confront a guest and ruin their Disney experience if there was any doubt at all that they had intended to steal an item, as opposed to misunderstanding somehow or accidentally carrying it out of the store. At one point during our summer, an entire family was arrested in the parking lot with a van full of merchandise they had been loading all day. They would walk into the store with a Disney shopping bag, load it with merchandise, and leave without paying for any of it. They repeated this for hours, and apparently had been doing it for months in order to ship the merchandise overseas and sell it on the black market. We also frequently had groups of 15 year old girls from Latin American countries on their quincenaros (15th birthday) trips who would come into the store and leave stacks of empty watch boxes, empty hangers and clothing tags behind in the dressing rooms...because they had carried in heaps of merchandise and then crammed it into purses or put it on so that they could walk out without paying for it. It was very frustrating as an employee to see all this theft and be powerless to stop it.

Disney is a strange and interesting place in a lot of ways. Two stories really stand out for me that summer, and they both involved the same poor guy named Shepherd. Shepherd was a young, very shy and very geeky college student from the midwest who it seemed had led a very sheltered life. He had flaming red hair (seriously, it makes mine seem dull in comparison) and that redheaded complexion that cal bloom into full red blushing in a second. We all liked Shepherd because he let us tease him and force that blushing at every opportunity, and he was just a really sweet guy. One day he was working at the watch counter during Disney's Gay Day (still unofficial back then), and was hit on very loudly and obviously by a male patron who told him he had a thing for redheads. I thought Shepherd was going to turn purple, he was so embarassed. But he just blushed like a madman and quietly told the guy that he was working and couldn't socialize.

Shepherd had the misfortune of working in the children's department one night when he noticed a man standing in the corner acting strangely. This store had a separate children's wing off to one side, and the store sort of curved around so people in the main part of the store could not really see the children's department dressing rooms or the register in the back (which we had christened "No Man's Land" for this very reason.) At the point where the store bent sharply to the right to lead into the children's section, a man stood in the corner with his hands in his pants fumbling. After watching him for a few minutes, Shepherd quietly called security. He told them that he thought a pedophile was in the children's department, masturbating as he watched small children come out of the dressing rooms with their parents while trying on new clothes. Before security could arrive, the guy was gone. We were all counseled to be vigilant to look for any suspicious behavior like that, especially since there were so many children around Disney at all times that it was very easy for a child to become lost and whisked away by a predator. (You would not believe how often every single night we would either find a child wandering aimlessly without a parent, usually crying so hard he or she could not even give a name, or worse a hysterical parent running around screaming that someone had taken their baby. Thankfully we didn't lose a single one that whole summer.)

Shepherd also told us an even more outrageous story that illustrates the interesting cultural differences we encountered at Disney. One night he was walking back from the cafeteria where we all ate dinner during our breaks, and he stopped into a public restroom. On his way in, he saw a woman wearing a vaguely middle eastern head covering who was squatting down in the bushes outside the ladies' room. He watched her for a second, and was horrified to see that she fumbled around, stood up, bent over and picked up a pile of feces which she carried into the ladies' room. Apparently this woman could not get accustomed to new-fangled sit down toilets, so she assumed the position for her usual squat toilet, did her business, and then disposed of the waste inside. Disney employees were always counseled about the importance of respect for the cultural differences of our international visitors, so he let the woman go on her way. And then ran back to the store to tell us all about it.

The experience of working at Disney for the summer gave me a great appreciation for how tightly they run the organization. Every single detail is carefully planned, and the lengths to which Disney goes to make sure everything is perfect is breathtaking. Before we could start work, we had to go through a two day training program in which we learned absolutely nothing about the job we were going to do. It was all about Disney culture, history, and what they expected out of their employees. For TWO DAYS. We were also told that secret shoppers were in the stores frequently and would measure things like how quickly we verbally greeted every patron who came within three feet of us. (We were supposed to do it in under 10 seconds.) The lingo, things like calling them guests, was grilled into us, as was the answer to the most common question we were asked by children: how can Mickey Mouse be in several different places at the same time? The only acceptable answer was that Mickey moved very quickly. If you admitted to a child guest that Mickey Mouse was actually a guy in a mouse suit, you would be fired on the spot. Any other tough questions that we got from patrons could be answered by calling the Information Center, which was set up just to answer random guest questions like "how many parking spaces are there in the Magic Kingdom parking lot?" Yes, they really hired people whose job it was to sit at a computer and answer phoned in questions like this all day.

I had a lot of fun working at Disney, but I didn't save very much money on account of the going out every night with my coworkers thing. I frequently got home well after 2am, and it felt like I barely saw my parents that summer. I think every kid who lives in Orlando has to work at Disney at least once in their lives, though, just to see the amazing behind the scenes workings. Having been in the tunnels beneath Magic Kingdom is one of those experiences that only the precious few ever get to enjoy, and it is remarkable to see in action. There are tunnel tours offered on occasion, and I think everyone should take one if you get the chance. That place is, quite literally, a well-oiled machine.

Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!