I love it when people get up in arms about "big brother" when all that is happening is they are finally enforcing a rule that was already in place. They are doing it quietly with a clever technology rather than trying to tick people off with real live cast members policing the situation.
It matters not to me. I don't use the overpriced generic mugs anyway.
I'm huge on privacy, and this isn't Big Brother. What are they going to do? Store the mug's code every time soda is dispensed and link the mug to your room to find out that you enjoy lemonade or perhaps the occasional Diet Coke?
If this were location data or something, I could see the argument, but it's not. It's not sensitive information, and the odds of Disney storing all of this information are slim to none. Obviously they're going to have to keep the mugs in the database during the trip, but I can't see them storing information each time a drink is dispensed. They might keep a count of how many times a drink is dispensed at what dispenser, whether it's a disposable cup or a re-usable mug, but I can't see them linking it to a specific person.
I like the idea of paying for an unlimted refill cup (one year) for any resort machine...Id gladly pay $50 for that... better than having a dozen of the cups per member of my family lol..... Hope they are bigger too the current cups are too small especially when you add a lot of ice for those hot days here in Florida.
The ability to use them in the parks would be great too...but I do not think they would be that generous lol
Maybe give a discount to old mugs. Come with your old mug and you can add a length of stay to the RFID tag for $10 or something.
Just some quick, not founded in fact, number crunching....
Based on our visits, I would vastly underestimate 2 'stolen' soda per half hour per resort. Assuming they pay next to nothing for the syrup, water, and gas, that's $10 lost revenue per hour per resort. For the sake of easy math, I'm going with 20 resorts (yes, there are more, but I like easy round numbers). So, $200 per hour WDW wide. Again, to make round numbers, I'm going with 20 hours of usage per day (since I was under on resorts, I'll be over on hours). So, $4000 a day of lost revenue. Multiplied by 365 days a year and we have $1,460,000 per year.
Now, I have no idea how much the new machines are costing Disney, but I would assume the initial install is a cost they see as absorbed almost immediately (as the machines need to be replaced every few years regardless). If the RFID tags are really 1/20 of a cent (as someone earlier suggested) and Disney has a little over 100 million visitors a year (I know that number includes all USA parks, but I'm doing easy numbers here) who buy 2 sodas each day, we have a total annual cost for the cups of 100,000.
So, with my very horribly estimated numbers, Disney is likely looking at well over $1 million in soda profit a year that is lost due to 'stolen' sodas in old mugs. That kind of bottom line could go a long way to improving infrastructure somewhere in the parks (monorail pylons or otherwise). I think I can understand why it is a priority for them.
I have also just secured the fact that I will never be an accountant.
It's actually $0.05. So a nickel per each tag. Don't know how I messed that up. XD Still, the numbers would probably work if you changed up the cost. The 100 million visitor figure is high, plus not all of those sodas would be purchased at resorts. I'd also estimate that the stolen soda figure is a bit higher.
During my last trip, during the course of a week, I saw probably around 15 outdated mugs (low estimate, plus some of the Memories mugs very well may be on their second use). Let's say I saw about a quarter of the people staying at the resort either eating or at the pool. This means that there were probably 60 old mugs at the Contemporary/Bay Lake Tower (I'd guess that the number is quite a bit higher than that, in actuality). 60 mugs at $15 a piece is $900 in lost revenue per week at a 900 or so room resort. Each week, that's $1 per room. 20,000 rooms at Disney resorts (probably way more than that), at $52 per year is just over a million dollars.
Now for cost. Let's use an inflated figure of 40,000 rooms with an average stay of 4 days, and an average room occupancy of 5. This would mean that about 18 million people stay at Disney resorts. If every one of them buys a mug, Disney is spending $900,000 extra on RFID tags.
With vastly inflated cost and slightly deflated revenue, Disney would make $100,000 on using RFID tags on mugs. Not a huge figure, but my math leans towards low profit anyway. In reality, they're probably making far more than that, but it's definitely making money. On mugs, at least. If the math for the cups is corrected for the RFID tag cost, which is 100 times larger, it loses $9 million on cups. XD
