Window Shopping For Foam

This past weekend while I was at Disneyland, I noticed on Twitter that there was a increase in foamy tweets. I'm looking at all of you, Disney-specific fan sites. "Jake, what are you talking about?" you ask?

I'll show you.

 Some may call this loud, and in your face, but if you look really closely at what specifically is being advertised in the windows, it's done the best it can be done. Big Top Toys has louder style kids shirts and toys in the window. Hats balanced nicely along the left side of the street at Los Feliz. Same with paper goods and books in another window. 

The fact of the matter, folks, is that Disney is a business. Yes, Walt Disney Imagineering is the artists point of the company, and they have created an immensely wonderful land that is ideally the dreamy 1920/30's Los Angeles. Some try to compare it to the wonder of Main Street USA, but the fact is, it has it's own quaint, romantic charm that's totally a different heartbeat than the conceptually designed Midwest town. But...

Disney IS still a business, as stated above. There ARE number crunchers and marketing directors that's sole job is to sell their product inside the land WDI created. There's still a good story told here on Buena Vista Street. It's just doing what the outside world does so well, and sells their product through an age-old marketing technique called (shockingly enough) window shopping. 

Who-da-thunk, right? 

The thing is, most of these geeks that lament over it, are going to be walking out of the park late at night after marathon riding on Radiator Springs Racers, chatting about Tardises....Tardi? whatever that British Time Box show is, and they'll see a window of a hat, or a hoodie, or metal vintage sign, and say "I just remembered, I have to go get one of those for my never-ending collection of Disney stuff!" 

Then they go into Elias and Co., or Los Feliz..shoot, even Big Top Toys (scratch that. They'll buy that plush Oswald in there for sure.), and buy what they remembered they needed to buy in the first place.

And wham. Disney wins again, without them even realizing it. Funny part is, they don't recognize that this marketing technique worked, works, and will still work for anyone in the world. Putting your product in a window is not just great promotion, but also in a street sense like Main Street (Geeks, remember, the original park's done this for YEARS) and Buena Vista Street, because you'll see it in the morning, not want to carry things around all day, come back down the street, probably still see it, walk in, and buy it. 

This is what I don't get. Fans lament over and over again about how "it ruins theming" and is "in your face and forces buying things upon you". If you can't look at a window with items in it, say "thats cool." and walk past without buying it, then clearly their technique worked, and you just bought something because you saw it in the window and wanted it. 

I'm sure there's some imagineers that might be bummed about some of the historical items not being in the windows, and admittedly, they were really cool! But we can't lose sight of the fact that this is a corporation with multiple facets that need to have their hands in areas too. There's still a huge amount of small props that add to the beauty of this new street. Just because the windows now have merchandise in them doesn't mean it's the end of the world.