The Disney Factor: What Retailers Can Learn About Standards, Service and Pricing

I’ve always been fascinated by Disney.

Not just the rides and the characters, but the business behind it all.

I’ve got several books on my shelf about the way Disney operates, including Be Our Guest, and there’s a lot that any business owner can learn from the way they approach customer experience.

But one thing has always stood out to me above everything else.

Standards.

And there’s a story from many years ago that sums it up perfectly.

A pair of Minnie Mouse Crocs

We were at Disney World in Florida with one of my kids’ friends, Beth, when she somehow managed to lose a shoe on the Haunted Mansion.

We went straight into a restaurant afterwards and, because she was walking around with no shoes on, a member of staff asked her to put them on.

Then somebody else asked.

And somebody else.

Eventually a manager came over and told us she couldn’t walk around without shoes. We explained what had happened and that one of them was currently somewhere inside the Haunted Mansion.

“Don’t move. I’ll be back.”

Five minutes later, she appeared with a brand-new pair of Minnie Mouse Crocs.

No charge.

Now, it would be easy to tell that story as an example of brilliant customer service.

But I think there’s a more important lesson in it.

It wasn’t simply good service. It was a standard.

Safety is Disney’s number-one priority. A child walking around barefoot didn’t meet that standard, so the team were empowered to do something about it.

Nobody said, “That’s not my department.”

Nobody disappeared for 20 minutes to find a senior manager.

They fixed it.

What standards are you prepared to walk past?

That’s where I think this becomes particularly relevant to independent food retailers.

We all have standards in our businesses.

The problem is that over time, standards can quietly slip without us really noticing.

You walk past the same front door every morning.

You look at the same counter.

You see the same shelves, signs, displays and fixtures.

And after a while, something dangerous happens.

You stop seeing what your customers are seeing.

The window that needs cleaning becomes normal.

The handwritten sign that was supposed to be temporary is still there six months later.

The shelf isn’t quite filled properly.

There’s a gap in the counter.

The outside of the shop looks a bit tired.

A member of staff carries on with what they’re doing instead of immediately acknowledging the customer who’s just walked in.

None of those things on their own will necessarily wreck your business.

But put enough of them together and they tell a story.

And it might not be the story you think your business is telling.

If we were a Michelin-starred restaurant, would we…?

At Turnbulls, we’ve often used a simple question:

“If we were a Michelin-starred restaurant, would we…?”

Would we leave that there?

Would our windows look like that?

Would we display the product that way?

Would we speak to a customer like that?

It’s not about pretending a butcher’s shop or farm shop is a Michelin-starred restaurant.

It’s about changing the lens through which you look at your own business.

Because if you see something every day, it’s remarkably easy to become blind to it.

Your customers haven’t.

There’s a pricing lesson here too

Disney is expensive.

Very expensive.

And yet they don’t exactly suffer from a shortage of customers.

I think there’s an important lesson in that for independent retailers, because sometimes we get the relationship between price and service the wrong way round.

We think:

We’d love to improve that, but we can’t afford to.

Perhaps sometimes we should be asking:

Are we charging enough to deliver the standard we want to deliver?

You need margin to invest.

Better people cost money. Maintaining your premises costs money. Great displays, good lighting, quality fixtures, training and all those little details that create a better customer experience cost money.

Charging more, of course, brings responsibility with it.

If you want customers to pay premium prices, the rest of the business has to be congruent with those prices.

You can’t have beautiful steaks in the counter and filthy windows outside.

You can’t talk about quality while customers are looking at tatty signs.

You can’t claim great service if nobody looks up when somebody walks through the door.

Price, product, surroundings and service all have to tell the same story.

That, for me, is one of the great lessons from Disney.

They charge the money required to create the experience they want to deliver — and then they pay extraordinary attention to the details that justify it.

Try the Disney test on your own shop

Here’s something worth doing this week.

Walk outside your shop.

Go far enough away that you can see the whole thing properly. Then turn around and approach it as though you’ve never been there before.

Look at the windows.

The entrance.

The signs.

Then walk inside and look at the shelves, the counter, the lighting, the displays and, most importantly, what happens when a customer arrives.

Try to see what they see rather than what you’ve become accustomed to seeing.

And ask yourself:

“If Disney ran this shop, what would they change?”

You don’t have to start handing out Minnie Mouse Crocs.

But I suspect you’ll spot two or three things you stopped noticing a long time ago.

And fixing those might do more for your customer experience than the next promotion you were planning.