Within modern manufacturing, value engineering tends to focus on reducing the cost of goods sold while maintaining or even increasing the consumer price of those goods. Value engineering is focused on increasing margins.
As applied to WDW, value engineering refers to Disney management's propensity in recent years to reduce the production cost of their goods by using less expensive and often lower quality material. Abandonment of custom printed napkins for generic brown napkins is an example of recent value engineering. Whether it's food or merchandise, it refers to WDW management's focus on reducing cost by eliminating variety and concentrating on high margin goods. The goal is not to reduce the cost to consumers; they are charged the same no matter how little the items cost to produce. Instead, it's to get WDW's "guests" to pay a premium for the Disney name without actually receiving a premium product.
Old school corporate Disney focused on providing excellent value to its customers. Case studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s often cited Disney as a company of excellence, intent on improving financial performance by providing a superior product, "the Disney difference".
Under Iger, the focus has shifted towards cashing in on the positive corporate image. Especially at WDW, the focus has been on value engineering the product.
In recent years, most intellectual resources at WDW have been devoted to identifying ways to squeeze out a few more pennies from their "guests" while Universal has been thinking big and focusing on winning the dollars
Even the $2B invested in NextGen has been more about maximizing return on the existing infrastructure rather than product improvement. NextGen is mostly about repackaging. At the end of the day, NextGen does nothing to increase ride capacity. At the end of the day, it's still the same old WDW.
