McKinsey - Disneyland

Mar 07, 2024

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When McKinsey Comes To Town

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Escape from McKinseyland

At this point, the most surprising thing about McKinsey may not be its involvement in some of the greatest corporate atrocities of the twenty-first century, but the fact that this notoriously ruthless international consulting firm consciously attracts bright-eyed do-gooders to its ranks.

“I came into my job as a McKinsey consultant hoping to change the world from the inside, believing that the best way to make progress is through influencing those who control the levers of power,” one former employee wrote in the magazine Current Affairs a few years ago. Business school graduates who only want to be rich naturally flock to Wall Street. But, according to investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, “younger, idealistic students concerned about issues like global warming, inequality, and racial justice” head to McKinsey.

And yet, despite the firm’s insistence that it’s a “values-driven” operation, McKinsey’s own internal documents tell a different story.

They reveal that its consultants devised business plans to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales in the United States, while the opioid crisis was already well underway; that they worked to increase fossil fuel companies’ revenue, while publicly professing concern over climate change; and that, among other gruesome schemes the firm has concocted over the years, its consultants even furnished the brutal Saudi government with a list of dissidents.

In When McKinsey Comes to Town, Bogdanich and Forsythe assemble a damning indictment of McKinsey’s practices through an excavation of its confidential (and controversial) business recommendations over the last several decades.

In recent years, some of these recommendations—McKinsey’s connections to the opioid crisis and its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration—bloomed into public scandals.
But, Bogdanich and Forsythe show, the company’s misdeeds go far beyond a handful of high-profile incidents. Even phenomena like the financial collapse of 2008 and the explosion of exorbitant CEO pay—both of which have exacerbated America’s already stark economic inequality—bear McKinsey’s imprint, if you know where to look.

The curious tension between the most antisocial aspects of the McKinsey model and the earnest commitments that appear to motivate its consultants undergirds the story.

Bogdanich and Forsythe, for their part, believe the company’s pronouncement that it ultimately seeks to improve the world. “There is no questioning McKinsey’s desire to do good, to give back,” they write in their epilogue.
But as their scrupulous reporting suggests, the very nature of both the consulting business and profit maximization has always ensured that McKinsey was going to do damage if it was to succeed, despite all the good intentions in the world.

McKinsey was founded in 1926 and spent the rest of the twentieth century burnishing its credentials as the world’s top consulting firm. Almost from McKinsey’s conception, its reputation has rested on recruiting eager graduates out of the top business schools, swiftly weeding out those who aren’t suited to the firm’s high-octane culture, and—most crucially—putting its clients’ interests before its own.

Over the last century, McKinsey has legitimately pioneered a number of industry-changing business solutions around the world, and today it counts the most profitable and well-known companies among its clients (though the official client list remains a highly guarded secret).
Its alumni populate the highest ranks of government (Pete Buttigieg, Tom Cotton), the C-suites of major corporations (Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai), and philanthropy (Chelsea Clinton).

“At one time or another most Fortune 500 companies have paid McKinsey for advice,” Bogdanich and Forsythe write. “So have more than a hundred government agencies around the world.”

What has allowed this vast influence to go mostly unnoticed is McKinsey’s strict commitment to what might generously be called client confidentiality, which incidentally also keeps the firm’s own activities almost totally hidden from view.

On one hand, as the authors note, McKinsey tends not to claim any public credit for its business successes; on the other, this code of silence means that it has been able to dodge both scrutiny and culpability when its business advice ends in corporate public relations disasters.

In the late 1990s, for instance, when the firm was contracted by Disneyland to audit the park’s operations, McKinsey advised a program of “cost avoidance,” a bloodless euphemism for staff layoffs, fewer trainings for employees, and cutbacks to ride maintenance.

In the wake of the downsizing, several parkgoers were injured or died on rides that staffers said had malfunctioned as a result of the severe cost-cutting. But as a third party, McKinsey was removed enough from the chain of command that it was able to say its consulting work was “not related to the tragic incidents at Disney.”
If McKinsey’s foundational principle of guarding its clients’ interests initially sounds vaguely noble, in practice it means that McKinsey exists primarily—if not exclusively—to help companies cut costs and juice profits. (McKinsey’s selflessness in this regard also conveniently happens to make the firm itself quite a lot of money; in 2021, it posted $10.6 billion in revenue.)
McKinsey’s aptitude for increasing client profit, after all, is what helped the firm build a sterling reputation in both the private and public sectors.
And though the McKinsey method has long drawn criticism—in his 2013 book, The Firm, reporter Duff McDonald famously wrote that McKinsey had been the “impetus for more layoffs than any other entity in corporate history”—it wasn’t until a few years ago that the firm found itself at the center of several full-blown public scandals.

In 2019, New York Times investigations by Bogdanich and Forsythe revealed that McKinsey had worked with Purdue Pharma to jack up OxyContin sales when hundreds of thousands of people had already died from opioids and the pharmaceutical industry was increasingly under fire. Worse still, court filings in 2020 revealed that partners had discussed destroying incriminating documents.
That same year, ProPublica reported that McKinsey had consulted for ICE while authorities were separating migrant children from their parents.

In a memo that scandalized even some ICE staffers themselves, the firm had suggested that ICE scale back food and medical care at detention facilities to save money.
According to Bogdanich and Forsythe, the company had been so good about keeping these and other projects confidential that even a number of its own consultants were unaware of the harrowing human costs of their employer’s activities until evidence surfaced in the media.

These scandals are not mere blips. Bogdanich and Forsythe make the case that working against the public interest is business as usual for McKinsey.
For one thing, its sprawling client list means that the firm is riddled with potential conflicts of interest.

Since the ’90s, McKinsey has consulted for health insurance companies and managed care providers while also advising state-level government officials on privatizing Medicaid services.
Likewise, the firm has simultaneously advised tobacco and vaping companies and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration office tasked with regulating those very products. While McKinsey says it has firewalls in place to prevent unethical transmissions of information across its many clients, Bogdanich and Forsythe are skeptical. “McKinsey’s specific advice to the FDA could not be determined, but the fact remains that the agency failed to identify and ‘proactively’ address vaping as a looming threat,” they write.
And, in 2022, The New York Times confirmed that at least 22 McKinsey consultants had advised both Purdue and the FDA, sometimes simultaneously.

The sheer size of the corporations the firm advises has also meant that its business advice has resulted in nothing short of catastrophe for millions of American workers.

In 2005, Walmart—the largest private-sector employer in the United States—hired McKinsey to help “slow the growth of employee costs, especially health care.” Walmart was already notorious for its poverty wages and bare-bones employee benefits; a significant portion of its workforce qualified for Medicaid or food stamps.
The task force convened by McKinsey suggested that Walmart could further lower its expenses by increasing the number of part-time positions ineligible for the company’s health care plan and scaling back on employees’ 401(k) plans and life insurance coverage. Fifteen years later, a congressional investigation confirmed that Walmart was still one of the primary employers of Medicaid and SNAP recipients in every state studied.

If Walmart’s meager compensation practices have exacerbated a national crisis of low-wage work, McKinsey’s signature cost-cutting schemes helped facilitate the zero-sum trade-off between the company’s profits and its employees’ well-being.

As writer and former McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas once said of the firm, “Even at its best, much of the work is about increasing investors’ share of the profits by reducing labor’s share.” Though McKinsey may indeed take pains to put its clients’ interests before its own, those “interests” are inevitably the interests of the company’s C-suite, not its rank and file.

Most troublingly, McKinsey’s influence radiates far beyond the individual companies it advises. As Bogdanich and Forsythe show, the firm was, from the beginning, an early and vociferous champion of a number of controversial practices that would ultimately remake American business to the detriment of workers.

In 1950, at the height of organized labor’s strength, a McKinsey report commissioned by General Motors and later published by the Harvard Business Review found that workers’ wages were rising faster than executive pay. On McKinsey’s advice, companies began inflating CEO compensation by linking executive salaries and bonuses to higher company profits, and adding stock options to compensation packages.

McKinsey has protested that it had no direct involvement in most of the events that Bogdanich and Forsythe recount, let alone the macroeconomic disasters. “A recently published book fundamentally misrepresents our firm and our work,” the company said in a public statement upon the release of When McKinsey Comes to Town. “The book also seeks to associate our firm with events—like the 2008 financial crisis, a Major League Baseball cheating scandal, or safety incidents at a theme park—that we simply had nothing to do with.”
And of course it’s not the case that McKinsey consultants personally loosened screws on Disneyland rides or forced lenders to package subprime mortgages into securities to be sold and resold by Wall Street until the housing market burst.

The slow-motion evisceration of the American middle class has been the consequence of a four-decade bipartisan embrace of free-market ideals like deregulation, free trade, and the systematic bulldozing of organized labor, not a single evil plan cooked up by a corner-office cabal.
But the business strategies that catapulted McKinsey to international renown (not to mention billions of dollars in consulting fees) are the very same ones that have amounted to pouring accelerant on those free-market ideals. And insofar as McKinsey—like every other consulting firm—makes its money by making other companies money, it has tremendous incentives to stay its path.

Or, as senior partners told one employee uneasy with the firm’s work with fossil fuel companies, “If we don’t serve coal clients, BCG [Boston Consulting Group] will.”

Exposing the Secretive and Sinister Work of McKinsey & Co. ❧ Current Affairs

McKinsey & Co. is the world’s leading consulting company. But it does a lot of work that’s, well, pretty downright sinister, and it’s very secretive about that work. In the book When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm, Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe of the New York Times expose the hidden hand of McKinsey across the world. McKinsey has assisted opioid manufacturers, tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and authoritarian governments around the world, and in each case has covered up its footprints.

Again and again, McKinsey has come to town and left people worse off.

Bogdanich and Forsythe show that many of the worst problems we face today have had McKinsey’s hand in them. The firm often advises both the companies that create problems and the governments that are trying to solve them, “playing both sides” and making a tidy sum in the process.

Bogdanich and Forsythe came on the Current Affairs podcast to talk to editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson about McKinsey’s work and its impact on some of the most pressing issues facing the world today, from climate to wages to industry safety. This transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

NATHAN J. ROBINSON
The world has many thousands of corporations and consulting firms. Why, of all the consulting firms in the world, did you choose to write a book about McKinsey & Company?
WALT BOGDANICH
Why McKinsey? Because it’s the biggest, most powerful, influential, and frankly, secretive company out there.

I can’t think of a company more secretive. In fact, that’s its business model. It never discloses who its clients are, or how much they’re paid.
They advise autocrats, democratic regimes, and opioid makers, in addition to the major corporations in the world. They charge a lot of money, and say they’re the best and the brightest, and apparently, a lot of people believe that. I’m not sure if they will after reading our book, but I guess time will tell.

ROBINSON
You describe this secretiveness in the book. Most companies that produce a product or a service might want to brag about what they do and post big lists of all of their prominent clients, so they can show off just how successful they have been.

But, as you mentioned, in the case of McKinsey, the opposite is really true. This is not conspiratorial; it’s literally that McKinsey even won’t put its name on the slides and documents. They really do make an effort to make sure that the hand of McKinsey is kept hidden from public view, and I assume it took a lot of work on your part to penetrate and report on this.

BOGDANICH
Yes. They prefer the shadows rather than sunlight, and our job was to bring the sunlight.

That was difficult. Their consultants sign nondisclosure agreements, and it’s pounded into their heads from the first day they walk into the office to never disclose their business—who they work for, how much they’re paid.
When you do finally pierce that corporate veil, you find out why they don’t like publicity. Many of their clients are deeply embarrassing, at least to people working for normal companies or normal citizens, because there’s a lot that they’ve done that they have to account for. And, frankly, the reason they’re finally accounting for it is the media called them on it.

MICHAEL FORSYTHE
There’s another reason for the secrecy.

When you look at the clients, oftentimes, you’ll see that they are both advising for regulated companies, like pharmaceutical companies, and also the regulator, like the FDA.
There have been times in McKinsey’s history when a competitor will find out that McKinsey is advising one of their competitors, for example, Ford or GM—McKinsey would advise both.

And there have been times with banks, like Citibank, and also with tobacco companies, where the CEOs of the companies get very upset when they find out that McKinsey is advising their competitor. So, when you disclose all the names, all the dirty laundry comes out.

BOGDANICH
To fully disclose here, they also advise the New York Times and the Washington Post, and what they do is tell one company how to beat the other company, and then they tell the other company how to beat the first company. It’s just nutty. I think it’s a conflict of interest that most rational people can understand.
an consequences. Could you talk about that?
BOGDANICH
Yes. Maintenance is an important part of any operation, particularly when lives are at stake. And believe me, lives are at stake in a steel mill and on these crazy rides in Disneyland and Disney World.

Safety should be paramount. But the company is cutting maintenance over the objections of the workers, who have said that this is dangerous. The unions have said it was dangerous at U.S. Steel. And I worked at U.S. steel and have seen what happens. One of my co-workers was burned alive when a hot ingot was dropped on him. So, it’s dangerous, and McKinsey was advising, “cut, cut, cut,” and the results were unfortunate.

ROBINSON
It seems there’s this commonality to the kinds of stories that come up. You look at McKinsey’s hand in lots of different issues, from the financial crisis to tobacco sales to the opioid epidemic, and it does seem that something that comes up over and over is this approach of being willing to find ways for a corporation to maximize profits, even at the expense of certain important social or human values.
BOGDANICH
Yes, that’s correct. The easiest way to boost profits and the bottom line is to cut expenses.

It’s much more difficult to actually produce a better product or invent something—that’s on the revenue side. That takes work, creativity, and skill. It doesn’t take any damn skill to lop off a quarter of the workforce and say, “good luck,” or to offshore those jobs, as they [have] over and over again.
They were one of the biggest cheerleaders of offshoring, and that obviously has an effect on the families of these people who lost their jobs, but also on the communities in which they live. So, they have had a hugely negative impact in many communities in this country.

Forsythe
Right, and why do they do this time and time again, all over the world? One of the reasons is that McKinsey has a set of values.

A lot of companies do, and just pay it lip service. McKinsey actually purports to take these values seriously. Number one on that list is to put the client’s interests above the firm’s. The client’s interests come first, and when they want something, McKinsey does it
If that client is a malign actor—if they’re trying to sell more opioids, more painkillers, more tobacco, or they’re an authoritarian country—it doesn’t matter. Often, these consultants will work so hard they seem to lose sight of the societal picture, the bigger picture, of what they might be doing and that it might be harming people, because of their laser focus on doing whatever the client wants them to do.

ROBINSON
Yes. It sounds like a value when you’re quoting the client’s interests above the firm’s interest, but when you actually think about what that means in practice, it raises huge questions.

If you were called upon to optimize Auschwitz, would you put the client’s interests above the firm’s interests? You point out they have this phrase, “We do execution, not policy,” where the firm has explicitly said, “We don’t get involved in the political questions. We’re just neutral optimizers.”

FORSYTHE
Yes. It’s very convenient to say that. That quote came from a senior partner overseeing McKinsey’s work with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], speaking to these young consultants after the work they were doing [for ICE] under Obama suddenly became work under President Trump, who had a very different vision for what ICE should be doing.

There was a lot of dissension, and this guy said, “We’re not doing policy. Just do your jobs, young associates. We just do execution, we don’t do policy.” But the truth is—one place to look at this is in Saudi Arabia—when you ask McKinsey, “Why are you in Saudi Arabia? Why do you stay there?” they’ll tell you, “We should be there, because if we weren’t there, that place would go to hell. You don’t want to have a revolution in Saudi Arabia.” [This is] a very political answer [and] justification for their work there, which goes against the whole idea of them just doing execution and not policy.

ROBINSON
Yes. You point out in the Saudi Arabia section that there was dissent within the firm. People did start questioning this, because there is this realization that some of the work being done helps to legitimize and shore up the regime. If you are helping the regime to function [and] monitor dissent, there’s no way to do that neutrally. As you mentioned, that is inherently political.
BOGDANICH
It is.
ROBINSON
Discuss one of the specific examples of how McKinsey has advised a corporation in ways we talked about—this common technique of boosting profits through “cutting, cutting, cutting?” Maybe you could take one of the examples, whether it’s what they did in the insurance industry or turbocharging opioid sales, and describe how it worked in a particular case?
FORSYTHE
Yes. I’ll talk a little bit about Allstate, for example. It’s quite a parable. Allstate was a very boring insurance company owned by Sears, Roebuck and Company for many decades and had a fairly good reputation.
They had this slogan for the last 70 years or so, [“You’re in good hands”], and were known throughout the United States and around the world as this respectable insurance company. But then with the financialization in the ’80s, you saw all these spinoffs of companies, and Sears sold off its insurance industry, including Allstate, in the early ’90s. The new management at Allstate wanted to boost their profits and had McKinsey come in.

People always wonder, “What do consultants do, actually?” There are a lot of jokes about it: They’ll ask for your watch, and then tell you the time. Little jokes that belittle their work.
But in fact, we wouldn’t have written the book unless we thought that McKinsey had a real big impact. And, yes, they do a lot of laughable things and [make] silly PowerPoint slides that really don’t tell you anything, but they also do things that really make a difference, and sometimes that’s a very malign difference.

With Allstate, they advised them on how to weaponize their legal department, and streamline their claims process to get most people through the process very quickly.

But, if anybody tried to dispute a claim, then they would throw the book at them—the idea being to scare lawyers into ever even contemplating suing Allstate on behalf of a plaintiff.
So, what we learned is that McKinsey tried to turn the claim center of Allstate into a profit center, and indeed, Allstate’s profits did soar and its expenses—the claims payouts—did fall in the period after McKinsey came in. And of course, who gets hurt by that? Mostly it’s Allstate policyholders—maybe they have an auto insurance policy and are not the most educated, and get pushed through to make a quickie settlement without getting the full amount that they might deserve.

BOGDANICH
One thing that I found most shocking in our research was the fact that this reputable company that advises the best companies and governments around the world would turn selling addictive products into a profit center.

And that’s what they did: advise the opioid makers, tobacco makers, and vaping companies. McKinsey doesn’t hire stupid people; they hire the very best that go to the best schools. These aren’t dumb people. They knew what they were doing.

They knew that cigarettes were lethal, and they knew that vaping was problematic, because non-smoking teenagers were using it. And certainly, they knew about opioids, and that led them, in the middle of the opioid epidemic, to advise turbocharging sales of opioids. They knew this, and yet they continued to serve these entities.

ROBINSON
Almost at the same time as your book was released, two of your colleagues at the New York Times, [Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas], published a really excellent story on the nonprofit hospital chain Providence Hospital. This hospital chain had been trying to bill poor patients for as much money as possible, and sure enough, halfway through the article, it reports the plan was engineered by McKinsey who came up with this new thing called “Rev-Up”—to rev the revenue by making sure that poor people didn’t know that they were eligible for free health care.
BOGDANICH
Health care is a major profit center for them as well, which is kind of ironic when you’re selling cigarettes, opioids, and vaping.

But they advise all the major hospital chains, the biggest medical centers and training hospitals, and almost all the pharmaceutical companies around the world, and make tens of millions of dollars in profits at the same time they’re also advising the Food and Drug Administration, which is supposed to be regulating them. Healthcare is a major area of focus for them, and, as the Times reporters showed, the result of that isn’t always good.

FORSYTHE
It fits in perfectly with what we were writing about in the book. It’s the same pattern, to the extent that even McKinsey—if you read the articles that he was talking about—devise how to answer and talk to these poor people on the phone and maximize the ability to extract money from them. That’s exactly what was happening at Allstate. They also came up with these phone conversations that you could have with claimants. So, it definitely fits the pattern.
BOGDANICH
We mentioned Disneyland earlier and how they advise them.

We describe the advice they were giving to the workers there and to the company. They were polling them, going around talking to the employees, saying, “We have this scientific method of analyzing maintenance. There might be too much time being spent on certain maintenance and too little time on other maintenance, and we’ve got to figure out the right proportion.”
And they said, “For instance, we looked at the lap bars on all the rides, and they never fail. So, why are you checking him every day?” And the employees responded, “They don’t fail because we check them every day.”

ROBINSON
I thought you said they hired the best and brightest?
BOGDANICH
Well, the best and brightest will sometimes do anything for money. And McKinsey is a perfect example of it.
ROBINSON
You report that the consequences of cutting maintenance were horrific and led to a few really terrible accidents. But, it’s phenomenal for a business if you can advise people on how to create problems, and then advise the healthcare providers who have to clean up the mess afterward.

Your book has a chapter titled “Playing Both Sides” about how it amounts to really helping people more efficiently create problems and then trying to stop the problems that the first set of clients has caused.

BOGDANICH
That’s not a bad way to summarize it. Actually, I wish I thought of that when we wrote that chapter.
ROBINSON
Well, that seems to be the case in advising fossil fuel companies.
FORSYTHE
That’s right. They also have a big business advising companies on sustainability. So do they play both sides? Definitely. McKinsey publicly talks about how they’re a green company committed to saving the planet. That’s their public face. If you go to their website, you’ll see it right away. They bombard people with emails on how green they are. But when you look at it, they’re advising some of the world’s biggest polluters.

If they were advising them on how to cut their carbon emissions, that would be fine. But what we found is, in many cases, they were advising them how to dig more coal out of the ground, and more efficiently produce and pump more oil.
When you have a few McKinsey consultants doing that, that makes each one of them responsible for megatons more carbon going into the atmosphere.

BOGDANICH
And it’s ironic. They recruit the best and the brightest, the most idealistic, by talking about things like climate change and inequality. They use that as a selling point. And when these people get their jobs and discover there’s this great space between what they were told and McKinsey’s actions, they become unhappy and angry. And fortunately, they have our phone number, and give us a call.
FORSYTHE
It’s a very attractive pitch that they give. They need to differentiate themselves from the Goldman Sachs and Blackstones of the world. If you want to make the world a better place, those people offer pretty thin gruel.

But McKinsey says you can make an impact: “We work on very laudable topics, such as vaccine distribution in Africa, working with nonprofits helping to clean up the climate.” And that’s all true. But the bread and butter work of McKinsey is not that kind of work, and so people do get disillusioned.

The true corporate horror story that's scarier than Stephen King

Forget Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe. If it’s a really scary book you’re after, bolt your doors, lock your windows and curl up under the covers with a copy of When McKinsey Comes To Town.

The McKinsey in question is not a bloodthirsty psychopath but an international consulting company, and if you’d never heard of them, well, unless you’re rich and gullible that’s just the way they like it.

You only have to ask McKinsey & Company for details on what it actually does for this to become clear. Its corporate slogan should be “Our business is none of your business”, as authors and New York Times journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe discovered, whenever they asked the company to explain its most egregious excesses.

It isn’t its slogan, of course. No, McKinsey describes itself according to whatever jargon suits the mood of the times, without actually telling you anything at all. Its website blathers that “our open ecosystem allows us to serve as end-to-end impact partners for our clients”. Heroic hogwash by any measure.

But look back at McKinsey’s history and you soon find out what being on the receiving end of its “end-to-end impact” really means.

Just ask Disneyland roller coaster rider Brandon Zucker, aged four, who fell out of the Roger Rabbit ride at Disneyland in September 2000 and was crushed by the following car. Actually, you can’t ask him, because he died aged 13 after suffering catastrophic brain injuries.

Until Disney hired McKinsey in 1996 to evaluate the park’s operation (as in, cut costs, raise profits) the place had a flawless safety record.

In business, it makes perfect sense to cut costs and raise profits for shareholders.

But wholesale slash-and-burn for a bonanza short-term gain is usually bad policy that can come back to bite you. Just ask the Amazon rainforest.

[Mckinsey advises disney]
In this case, the advice came in 1997, along with a hefty bill, in the form of a lengthy report, Transforming Maintenance: Defining the Disney Standard.

Implementing the new Disney standard of maintenance resulted in what even McKinsey would have to call “a sub-optimal outcome” for Brandon Zucker.

You see, the company changed the ride maintenance policy after noticing that the lap bars on roller coasters were inspected daily “when records show they never fail”

Ride maintenance worker Bob Klostreich, then aged 20, was flabbergasted.

“The reason they don’t fail is because we check them every night,” he observed at the time.

In 1999 Klostreich was fired after raising further safety issues with management. Two months later, Brandon had his “end-to-end impact” McKinsey safety experience.

There were to be more injuries and deaths on other rides, until the Californian government finally stepped in and forced Disney to clean up its act in 2003.
Disney had to pay millions in damages to crippled customers and bereaved families, and fair enough too.

But not McKinsey. It pocketed the money for its dodgy safety and efficiency reports and walked away.

The Disney disaster is just a foretaste. Bogdanich and Forsyth forensically dissect a slew of McKinsey’s corporate capers in their gripping, if horrifying, account.

McKinsey advised Purdue Pharmaceuticals on how best to turbocharge production of lethally addictive OxyContin painkillers (“turbocharge” was McKinsey’s word), while taking millions from the US Food and Drug Administration “to enhance the agency’s ability to identify drugs harmful to consumers” at the same time.

This kind of double dipping is something of a McKinsey specialty.

Working to help companies navigate government regulations, while consulting for the government departments that regulate the market they’re working in. And this can be any government – McKinsey has long ceased to be a solely US-based concern.
It goes where the money is, and hey, there’s money to be had in Australia, too. The book only makes passing reference to McKinsey’s operations here, but notes that BHP was one of its first big clients.

Canberra, of course, is not immune. The Australian Government broke the billion-dollar barrier in 2021 on consultant spending, with a tidy slice going to McKinsey.

The ABC reported in 2020 that McKinsey billed us $660,000 for four weeks’ work advising on “vaccines and treatment strategy”.
The resulting eight-page document must have been pretty convincing, because over 2020/21 McKinsey milked another $5 million out of Canberra, for advice on candidate vaccines and roll-out strategies. Yep, we’ve been paying McKinsey and Company a fortune, for pharmacy advice. Turbocharged OxyContin, anyone?

Disney Proposal to Restructure, on McKinsey’s Advice, Triggered Uproar From Creative Executives

Walt Disney Co. was working with consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in recent months on an effort to centralize control of major spending decisions, triggering an uproar from top creative executives at the entertainment giant, according to people familiar with the matter.

Discussions regarding the plan were under way in the weeks leading up to Nov. 20, when Disney’s board of directors fired Bob Chapek as chief executive and replaced him with his predecessor, Robert Iger.

Disney’s Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy spearheaded the wide-ranging cost-cutting effort, which was blessed by Disney’s board of directors and given the go-ahead by Mr. Chapek, the people said.

The company hired McKinsey in September to review Disney’s operations and identify redundancies and cost-saving opportunities
The McKinsey team quickly set about interviewing senior executives as part of its review, with a particular focus on how Disney marketed its content, the people familiar with the matter said.

One potential change McKinsey was exploring was taking decisions about spending on marketing and publicity for films and television programs out of the hands of studio executives and instead centralizing them in another part of the company, the people said.

Disney itself had already considered shifting oversight of marketing spending to Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution, or DMED, some of the people familiar said. Led by executive Kareem Daniel, a top lieutenant of Mr. Chapek, that division already had considerable influence over content.

The plans that were emerging rankled some of the entertainment company’s top content executives, already reeling from losing power over spending decisions on content, and became one of several points that exposed a further rift between the creative and corporate leadership of the company during Mr. Chapek’s brief reign as CEO.

Some executives told colleagues they felt that the changes would strip them of nearly all of their power, people familiar with the situation said.

Disney Ride Upkeep Assailed

In 1997, Disneyland moved to what is known in aerospace and other safety-conscious industries as “reliability-centered maintenance.”

The system uses repair histories and failure rates -- rather than the intuition of experienced workers -- to determine how often a procedure needs to be performed.
Consultants hired to map the change said the move would save the Anaheim theme park millions of dollars a year in maintenance costs and allow hundreds of jobs to be eliminated.

It’s unclear how many of the consultant’s recommendations were adopted and how much money the park saved. But a review of internal company documents, court cases, government records and interviews with 18 current and former park workers shows that Disneyland’s push for efficiency over the last six years led to an upheaval backstage, where the park’s “magic” becomes a matter of nuts and bolts.

Outside experts say the maintenance changes confirmed Disneyland’s reputation as a safety leader among amusement parks, using the latest techniques to protect visitors.
Along with adopting reliability-centered maintenance, Disneyland hired better-educated workers with more sophisticated skills to maintain the rides and transferred many to the night shift, where they would could work without interruptions.

But many workers say the changes also gutted workforce morale and employees’ sense of ownership of the rides. Employees once wedded to a single ride for years now floated among several attractions.

Parts became difficult to obtain quickly, workers said, and when rides broke down, they stayed down longer -- especially when the problem occurred during the day.
Staffing and maintenance procedures were pared back -- along with, some workers say, redundancies that provided an extra margin of safety.

Leslie Goodman, senior vice president of strategic communications for Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, wrote in an e-mail that “a safe environment has been and remains our top priority.”

But she declined to discuss details of the park’s maintenance procedures. “Given the status of the state’s ongoing investigation [into the Big Thunder Mountain accident], it would be irresponsible for us to respond,” she wrote, because comments could undermine the probe.

Disneyland officials also have described many of the former and current workers who complain about maintenance as disgruntled, and point out that some lost their jobs as a result of the change in procedures.

Nine visitors have died in ride-related accidents at Disneyland since the park opened in 1955, in most cases because of their own mistakes.

. The two fatalities that occurred after 1997, however, were in accidents in which maintenance arose as an issue for investigators -- including the recent crash on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
A nonfatal accident in 2000 that injured nine on Space Mountain occurred after a bolt broke on a wheel assembly.

“I have a lot of loyalty to Disneyland, but I feel that somebody’s got to say something about how they’re operating out there,” said Bob Penfield, who worked on the park’s rides from opening day until his retirement as a supervisor in 1997. “When Disneyland opened, safety was the No. 1 thing. Now they say that today too. But I think over time, profit became more important.”

Another worker, in an interview with state investigators after a parkgoer was killed in 1998 by an iron cleat that broke off the Columbia sailing ship, said the change in maintenance procedures made it difficult to get rides fixed quickly.

He and a second worker told investigators that wood around the cleat was weak, though this was never formally identified as a cause of the accident.
“The climate that we’re operating in here has changed dramatically in the last few years,” said veteran ride operator Tom Bugler, according to a recording of his interview with investigators. “I am one that calls routinely every week for things to get repaired, and normally they aren’t repaired.” Bugler still works at the park. He would not comment for this story.

In one instance, Bugler told investigators, a railing collapsed on a bridge leading to the Columbia. He said he was forced to close the attraction because maintenance had no carpenters to fix the railing. And when a worker finally arrived, it was a machinist who left the rotting wood intact and made a makeshift fix with metal.

Before 1997, Bugler told inspectors, each ride had its own maintenance crew and supervisor. “People were just sitting in the back just waiting for something to happen,” he said. “Everything was maintained in such pristine condition, we never had to think about anything deteriorating.”

Comparing Disneyland’s accident rate with other amusement parks is difficult because no one collects comprehensive data. But three industry experts who have worked as consultants for the park all described Disneyland’s safety procedures as exemplary.

“I think they have one of the best safety cultures in the country; certainly better than NASA’s,” said Nancy Leveson, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “While a lot of companies give lip service to safety, Disney really does care.”

Worker complaints are natural after any major change, whether the change is good or bad, Leveson said. “I think that’s common everywhere. Nothing’s ever the way it used to be. The world is changing ... I think it’s very hard for some of the old-timers.”

Disneyland is the “gold standard for everyone else in the business,” said another expert, T. Harold Hudson, a former vice president of engineering for Six Flags Inc., which operates dozens of amusement parks across North America. Hudson said reliability-centered maintenance is used at other amusement parks and doesn’t undercut safety. He cited wheel adjustments as an example.

“As you do that day in and day out, you find out that the wheels never need adjusting,” Hudson said. “So why do you want to do that every day?”

The change at Disneyland was overseen by Paul Pressler, a former toy industry executive and former chief of Walt Disney Co.’s retail stores who became the park’s president in late 1994. By the time he was promoted to head the company’s theme-park division seven years later, Pressler earned a reputation as a cost-cutter who cared deeply about Disney’s stock price.

Not long after Pressler arrived, the management consulting firm McKinsey and Co. was hired to reorganize the park’s facilities, engineering and construction division, which is responsible for inspecting and repairing Disneyland’s rides.

In 1997, McKinsey recommended that the facilities division’s budget for 2000 be cut by nearly 25% to produce a savings of $16.9 million, according to a copy of the report summary prepared for Pressler.

Eventually, 317 of the division’s 738 jobs could be eliminated, the report said.
McKinsey said the majority of the maintenance staff should be moved to the graveyard shift to improve efficiency.

The consultants concluded that entrenched managers were “often the source of change resistance.”

These up-from-the-ranks craftsmen lacked the skills and formal education needed to create “world-class maintenance” management.
They didn’t understand concepts such as cost-benefit analysis and break-even analysis. Half of these 68 supervisors should be transferred or let go, McKinsey said, and the number of managers should be cut by nearly a quarter.

“There was a major cultural shift that focused on economics -- being as lean an operation as possible to maximize profit at Disneyland,” said one former park executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he signed an agreement not to talk about the company. “The message was: Do more with less.”
Pressler, who left Disney last year to become chief executive of retailer Gap Inc., declined to be interviewed. And Disneyland wouldn’t comment on how many of the jobs eliminated were directly related to ride maintenance, or what today’s staffing or maintenance budgets are.

David Miller, a Los Angeles stock analyst who tracks Disney, said the company spends about 3% of its theme park and resort revenue on maintenance -- an amount standard in the industry.

What’s clear, though, is that the systemic changes at Disneyland after the McKinsey study troubled old-timers who suddenly found themselves marching to a different beat.

Because so few mechanics were left on day shifts, for example, “We could have three rides down at any one time,” while the park was open, said a former mechanic who worked on a skeleton daytime crew.

“One time, Indiana Jones went down for a dead vehicle. We responded to that. It was a computer problem. Then Peter Pan goes down. The supervisor said ‘Go to Peter Pan -- leave Indiana Jones alone.’ When we got there, people were hanging in the air on Peter Pan.”

David Koenig, a business journalist who has written two books about Disneyland’s backstage culture, said these and other changes demoralized workers.
“It’s not the number of workers or the size of the department, but the change in feeling among the workers who are there,” Koenig said.

Park veterans recall how redundancies in the old system meant that rides were reinspected by workers who came in behind regular maintenance crews -- an illustration, they say, of how costs took a back seat to preventing potential problems.

“There’s nothing wrong with saving money,” said Mike Goodwin, a maintenance supervisor whose went to work at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park after his job at Disneyland was eliminated in 1997. “But not at the expense of your prime objective, which is to keep the place running safely.”

Goodwin recalled a confrontation that typifies the old thinking and the new: Bob Klostriech, a supervisor who was fired in 1999, was quizzed by a McKinsey consultant who was reviewing records for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

Why, the consultant asked, do you inspect the lap bars daily? The records show they never fail.
“Klostriech called him an idiot,” said Goodwin, who witnessed the exchange. Klostriech, he said, told the consultant: “The reason they don’t fail is because we check them every night.”
Goodwin and others say maintenance workers once padded the margin of safety at Disneyland by replacing parts before they showed signs of wear.

In 2000, a bolt broke on a Space Mountain wheel assembly, causing the accident that injured nine. In a deposition given in a lawsuit against Disneyland, Klostriech’s supervisor, Scott Smith, described the role cost plays today in the preventive maintenance of parts.

“If the consequences of failure involve risk to health or safety, you are compelled to develop a mitigation strategy,” he said. How far Disneyland goes to prevent any other “functional failure,” he added, is “completely a financial question.”
Smith’s description echoed a comment that three workers say Pressler made in January 1998 during an impromptu visit to the Disneyland Railroad’s workshop.

“He said, ‘We have to ride these rides to failure to save money,’ ” said David O’Neill, a train operator who has worked at the park since 1957 and was among those present.

“I was surprised anyone would say that.”

13 Shocking Freak Accidents That Happened at Disneyland

9. Accident on Space Mountain Injures Nine Passengers

In August 2000, Disneyland’s Space Mountain roller coaster made a violent emergency stop when a wheel assembly came loose from one of the cars.
The initial report suggested that the accident only caused minor injuries to nine passengers. An Anaheim fire captain claims that the park deliberately concealed the full extent of the accident and the resulting injuries.
Other firefighters reportedly heard Disney security officers congratulating themselves for keeping the details off of emergency radios. A year later the truth came out.

Jonathan Woodcock, and his wife Julie, filed a lawsuit against Disneyland in 2001.

Jonathan suffered 13 bulging disks, nerve damage down his spine, broken teeth and a dislocated jaw.
Julie had two herniated disks and suffered permanent damage to a hip, knee and shoulder. State officials said that if the same accident occurred today there would be a full-blown investigation.

6. Roger Rabbit Ride Seriously Injures and Eventually Kills a Young Child

On Sept. 22, 2000, a four-year-old named Brandon Zucker suffered injuries that would ultimately result in his death. Brandon fell out of a “taxicab” on Disneyland’s Roger Rabbit Cartoon Spin Ride, and was folded in half when another vehicle rolled over him.
Ten minutes later, when emergency personnel were finally able to free Brandon, he had gone into cardiac arrest and required resuscitation. Brandon suffered serious injuries and irreversible brain damage. He never spoke or walked again.
After a painful struggle that lasted for years, Brandon finally died on January 26, 2009.
The state Division of Occupational Safety and Health determined that Disneyland employees failed to properly secure Brandon’s lap bar, and ordered the park to make safety changes to the ride. Disney settled out of court with the Zucker family, but did not assume legal responsibility for the accident.

5. Death on Big Thunder Mountain
Every now and then an accident occurs at Disneyland and the park doesn’t blame it on the recklessness of its visitors. This was the case on Sept. 5, 2003, when a car on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad partially derailed. The crash killed 22-year-old Marcelo Torres and injured another 10 passengers. Park staff had noticed unusual sounds coming from the train but no maintenance was done on the broken ride.

It turns out that a mechanic didn’t tighten a couple of bolts or attach a safety wire to the wheel assembly. This allowed the train to separate from the track. The state ordered Disneyland to retrain its maintenance workers. A month after the ride was reopened, two trains crashed during a test run and the state ordered Disneyland to retrain its workers again. In a confidential settlement with the Torres family, Disney was forced to admit responsibility for the incident.

Mouseplanet - Who's to Blame?

While last week's findings on the Big Thunder accident did not legally absolve Disneyland, the Company sounded all but exonerated in its preemptive admission of blame released the day before the report from the State of California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) came out.

Disneyland emphasized that its policies and procedures were safe; individual employees who followed them improperly were at fault.

Analysts and other admirers reacted jubilantly that the determination was that employees erred. Blame fell to a machinist who didn't tighten a bolt and secure safety wiring, and a manager who erroneously signed off that the work was completed. See!, supporters shouted. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Disneyland's maintenance department! There's no evidence of widespread deterioration caused by budget cuts. The system itself, they argued, is fine.
I'm not so sure.

Certainly it's possible these were isolated errors. Maybe, there's more to it. Consider the spotless record of Disneyland's maintenance department for 42 years—until it's turned on its head in 1997. Then, in the ensuing five years, innocent bystanders start getting maimed and killed by these same once-safe attractions.

So what exactly happened to Disneyland's maintenance department in 1997? That's when the Management Consultants from McKinsey & Co. arrived, young MBAs fresh out of Harvard, ready to show grizzled theme park veterans how to provide “world class” service.

Of course, the typical management consultant can't actually tell you what “world class” means. In the revealing book Dangerous Company: The Consulting Powerhouses and the Businesses They Save And Ruin, even renowned consultants who have authored books on becoming a “world class” organization can't define the term.

Evidently, becoming world class entails abandoning everything you've ever known about your industry and squeezing your business through a pre-set template of changes. It's like your company goes through a Play-Doh Fun Factory and comes out the other end with the minimum number of employees working as much as they can in the minimum amount of time.

Employee morale isn't factored into the equation. Most of the old-timers, who may be more likely to resist change (and coincidentally are higher paid), are the first to go. And anyone else who doesn't publicly embrace the new system is next in line.
I recently spoke with a former executive at another large company that enlisted McKinsey shortly before Disneyland did.
He and others were skeptical of the consultants' drastic suggestions, but his arguments were ignored by the firm's chief executive (who, ironically, currently sits on Disney's board of directors).

“The problem is these consultants come in with no knowledge of the business they're hired to assess,” he explained. “They think that success is determined by the process, the system, and that people are interchangeable. No, people must take ownership of the system or it will fail.”

The result is a toxic workplace. The employees who remain are typically lower paid, less experienced, and less motivated. Remember, it's a key component of the system that individuals are unimportant.

This is the opposite of the age-old “Disney Way,” in which every job was crucial in “creating happiness” for each guest. For decades, Disneyland maintenance workers were part of a team, a family, dedicated to perfection. They took pride in their work because they felt a connection to and affinity for the finished product. Now, demoralized, they see themselves as part of the machinery.

This is the atmosphere backstage at Disneyland, where once-unimaginable tragedies are not so surprising anymore.

The culture at Disneyland must change. It's not a store or a factory; it's a unique entertainment business.

Brandon Zucker dies at 13; injury at Disneyland brought focus to amusement park safety

In the days and months after 4-year-old Brandon Zucker was trapped under the Roger Rabbit Car Toon Spin ride at Disneyland in September 2000, his mother said, she would sit at his hospital bed and whisper her son’s favorite phrase into his ear: “I have an idea.” She would beg, even as hope dimmed, “Get up and let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”
Although Brandon, who turned 13 two weeks ago, left the hospital, he never recovered from his injuries.

He died early Monday morning in his mother’s arms at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, more than eight years after the widely publicized accident that helped focus attention on amusement park safety.

Now, his mother envisions, he’s making up for lost time.

“He’s running and playing with all his legs and feet on his scooter up in heaven,” Victoria Zucker said.

During a family visit to Disneyland, Brandon tumbled from a spinning Roger Rabbit “taxicab” and was trapped under another car.
The vehicle rolled over him, folding his 45-pound body in half. He was stuck for about 10 minutes before being freed, suffering serious brain damage. Although he would occasionally smile and laugh, he never talked or walked again.
On Sunday morning, Brandon’s father, David Zucker, found him unresponsive at their home in Anaheim and called 911, officials said. Brandon was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital and later transferred to Children’s Hospital in Orange, where he died at 1:13 a.m. Monday, said Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

“He battled with this for eight years, in and out of the hospital, and he fought for a very long time,” Victoria Zucker said.
“We did every kind of therapy and everything we could possibly do for him in the eight years. He just got tired. But he still gave us a lot of love, and we gave it to him.”

The accident marked the first major investigation conducted by the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health under a law regulating amusement parks. That law required parks to report serious injuries and accidents and gave the state the authority to investigate and order fixes.

The state determined that Disneyland employees did not properly load Brandon into the ride -- with the smallest child farthest from the cutout entryway -- and failed to fully lower the lap bar.

It also ordered significant safety changes to the ride, including a sensor-equipped guard around the bottom of each car.

The Zuckers sued Disneyland, settling for an undisclosed sum that helped pay for his costly medical care.

Brandon, who was born Jan. 12, 1996, had several bouts of cellulitis and in the last year, his health declined, his mother said. His scoliosis, which worsened as he grew, made it increasingly difficult for him to breathe.

“It’s done,” Victoria Zucker said. “Every time he was poked and prodded, another piece was taken out of my heart. I’ve been grieving for eight years.”
In addition to his mother, who lives in Laguna Hills, and his father, Brandon is survived by an older brother, Nicholas. Memorial services are being arranged.

Disneyland Ride Design Blamed in Accident That Injured Boy, 4

California investigators have blamed flawed ride design and operator error for a Sept. 22 accident at Disneyland that left a 4-year-old boy with severe brain damage.

Disneyland officials disagreed with the report but said they would comply with its requirements and spend the next several months overhauling the ride. The attraction is expected to reopen next summer.

The report released Friday by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration said the preschooler, Brandon Zucker of Canyon Country, Calif., in northern Los Angeles County, was seated in the wrong spot on the Roger Rabbit Car Toon Spin and that it appeared ride operators had failed to lower the lap bar properly to keep him in place.

"Our conclusion was that they did not follow the loading order that they were trained to follow," said Len Welsh, the agency's special counsel. "Obviously, where the boy was sitting had something to do with how the accident happened."

The investigation was among the first under a new state law regulating fixed amusement parks in the wake of several high-profile accidents that aroused public concern. And the report was released during a week when Disneyland was forced to cut off ticket sales three times because swelling attendance put the park at capacity.

According to investigators, Brandon was sitting next to the cut-out entryway to the ride car, his older brother and mother to his left, and most likely tumbled out that opening.
He then was pinned under the following car, in which his father and grandmother were riding. Welsh said investigators found no evidence that Brandon may have been misbehaving.

The state ordered Disneyland to add closures to the entryway and a sensor-equipped guard around the bottom of the vehicle before the ride can be reopened.

According to investigators, such a guard would both physically prevent people from getting caught under the vehicles and stop the ride almost instantly by sensing when a car has come into contact with any obstruction.

Brandon was dragged about 10 feet along the slow-moving ride before it stopped automatically.

His 45-pound frame was trapped underneath a taxicab for about 10 minutes, folded forward at the waist with the weight of the vehicle on his back, before emergency workers could pull the cab off.
The little boy was without breath or pulse for several minutes and has never fully regained consciousness.
The state report says that once the accident had occurred, the park's emergency responses were proper and help arrived as soon as possible.

Brandon is in a long-term facility in Orange, Calif., for children with brain injuries, and his family has moved to Irvine, Calif., to be near him.

Disneyland Closes Space Mountain After Accident Hurts 9

Disneyland closed the Space Mountain roller coaster through Tuesday after it malfunctioned Monday night, causing minor injuries to nine people.
The names of the injured were unavailable from either the theme park or the Anaheim Fire Department. All were treated at local hospitals and released. The most seriously injured, a German woman, was treated at Western Medical Center in Anaheim for multiple bruises.

Disneyland reported the accident Tuesday afternoon to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, as required under a new state law regulating the industry.

Cal-OSHA officials said they are investigating the accident, as is Disney.

Although the law has yet to be implemented fully, it requires that accidents be reported within 24 hours.
The Space Mountain accident occurred when a wheel came apart or was dislodged from the track about 10:55 p.m. Monday, bringing the car to a stop, Fire Department spokesman Kent Mastain said. Firefighters unbolted the seat to remove the most seriously injured passenger, he said.

Disneyland spokesman Ray Gomez said a support arm underneath the car that ran between two wheels came loose, causing the ride to stop suddenly. He did not know what caused the problem.
“All normal ride safety control systems worked as designed and brought the system to a halt,” he said.

Gomez said the Tomorrowland ride, a roller coaster through the dark interior of Space Mountain, had never had any mechanical problems before at Disneyland or the other Disney parks.
The theme park industry in California had long kept itself free of state oversight until a series of incidents, most notably the Christmas Eve 1998 accident at Disneyland that killed a tourist from Washington state and injured two others.

Cal/OSHA blamed an inadequately trained worker and misuse of equipment for the accident on the sailing ship Columbia ride.

The fatal accident also renewed interest in Sacramento in regulating amusement parks. The state adopted a law last fall to require annual inspections of rides, safety guidelines and reporting of accidents. But the rule-making process to implement the law has since become bogged down amid industry objections.

The Space Mountain accident was revealed a day after a new federal report focused attention on dangers at theme parks across the nation.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which backs pending legislation to give it power to investigate accidents, said its survey of 100 emergency rooms found that 7,260 people were injured on permanent amusement park rides last year, a 12% increase from the previous year and a 95% rise over the 1996 figure.

Commission officials defended the survey, however. Jacqueline Elder, a deputy assistant commission director who oversees its reports, said that if theme parks had been required to report accidents, as traveling carnivals and fairs are, the commission would have had better numbers to work with.

Space Mountain is a 23-year-old roller coaster that is one of Disneyland’s most popular attractions. A sign at the entrance to the ride Tuesday showed Mickey Mouse in a hard hat, holding a paint brush. “Sorry folks, this attraction is closed for refurbishment,” it said.

Mike Clifford of Glendora felt that he should get a free pass for a return visit. “This is one of the best rides here,” he said. “It’s dark and fast. For all the money you have to pay to get in here, you want to be able to go on Space Mountain.”

Jake Tran

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