With the exception of this holiday week, and Jersey week, the reports have consistently been that the weekends are crowded and weekdays are extremely slow.
Mr. Disney did a beautiful job of creating so many parks, movies, characters, etc. that I and my family hold very dear to our hearts. However, the simple fact is that if Walt were in charge today, he would have had to adapt to the changing times or Disney would have been swallowed up long ago. The value of the Disney name is really unmeasurable. Since stock price is very measurable, Disney is always a prime target for takeover. Simply remaining profitable is not enough to keep this from happening. Disney must run its business like any other corporation, yet keep its core values. This is not easy to do. Without the cutbacks, profits would fall further, and the stock price would fall. The further it falls, the cheaper a buy Disney and its parts become.
The alternative is having the entire corporation swallowed up by an AOL/Time Warner, or have the pieces chopped up and sold to the likes of Six Flags, Busch, AOL/TW, etc.
Even in these tough times, Disney is offering more for the dollar than any other competitor. They are committed to continuing this. EE is gone? If you are put off enough by this to cancel a trip, one would have to seriously question your motives for going in the first place. DL used to be closed on Mondays, and there was no other Disney park to go to. What if Mr. Eisner did that today? He would be further villified and accused of taking away the Magic. Yet Mr. Disney himself used to close his park on Mondays.
Just as family operated sports franchises cannot compete with the corporate giants, the old Disney way of running the company cannot compete with the other entertainment giants. Disney has done a lot more than anyone else has to build its Magic. FOUR parks in one resort in Florida! Two in SoCal! Tokyo, China, Paris, etc. There has been tremendous growth and the Magic now reaches more than ever. But attendance begins to drop with the economy, then plummets with the economy, and some say they don't feel the Magic anymore because EE is gone??? How would you feel if AOL/TW bought the Magic and plastered a big picture of Porky Pig on Cinderella's castle? Mr. Disney didn't have to worry about that. Mr. Eisner does.
I'm not saying I agree with everything Mr. Eisner does, or even that there might not be a better person for the job out there somewhere. But the parks have been hit extremely hard over the last few months, and there was no way to predict it. Some may have forecasted the economy would weaken to this point, but NOBODY thought it would happen in the blink of an eye on 9/11. Disney has not closed any parks, as most other companies would have. They are all still open 7 days a week, every week. They are handling this in a much more customer friendly way than anybody else would have, and they are doing a good job of balancing this with their need to cut costs.
If you don't feel the Magic because you can't get into the park early, you never really felt it in the first place.
inkbounc 
