Disney paid Mike's salary and took care of his rent, but it was Twinings Tea that had sponsored him and paid for his airfare, and it was in Twinings shop in Epcot (the Tea Caddy) where he worked. So where does his loyalty lie?

It was about 3 months in that I received a note from the Fellowship office, informing me that a gentleman from the Twinings branch in Greensboro, North Carolina, would like to meet me. I was sponsored by Twinings so I had to expect it; what I didn’t expect was to be briefed by the Fellowship office on what I should and should not say. The manager from the office was also going to be joining us for the meeting, where I experienced the politics of corporate sponsorship.

Twinings Tea had to pay a fee for the privilege of a shop in the World Showcase. It was a form of sponsorship. I was told they paid $100,000 a year for the privilege. On the scale of things, this isn’t a great amount of money, but it was 20 years ago and we are only talking about a small shop. So it was still a significant amount, and the sponsors naturally wanted to keep up to date with what was going on. As they had sponsored me, I was their eyes and ears. One of the concerns they did express to me before I ventured out to Florida was other products taking up too much space in “their” shop. Twinings sponsored the Tea Caddy and naturally expected it to be full of their products. In reality, they had about two thirds of the shop, and at times less. I was informed by Disney not to mention this to them. Talk about being stuck in the middle; how much loyalty goes to your sponsor (Twinings) and how much goes to your employer (Disney).

I didn’t want Twinings to feel that sponsoring me had been a waste of time, so I decided to hedge my bets. As part of the agreement of my sponsorship, I had to write and send a monthly report to Twinings. In the days before email, this meant handwriting and posting a letter. I did do it, but not every month. In one of my letters I had mentioned to them about losing some of their space in the shop, and this may have been what prompted the meeting.

I met with the Twinings guy from Greensboro and my Fellowship manager for lunch in the Norway Pavilion. I hardly got a single word in, as the Disney manager steered the conversation, totally in favour of Disney, as you would expect. I could tell the guy from Greensboro was frustrated, and a couple of weeks later I received a private letter from him suggesting we go for lunch or dinner somewhere in private. It was about 4 weeks later that he came back again, and we did secretly meet for dinner, on him, at the Grand Floridian.

This was a real dilemma for me, though. I had already overstepped the mark, and at the end of the day Disney was my employer and I didn’t want to upset them further and be sent home on the next plane. So I had a very cautious dinner meeting with the Twinings representative, basically saying that displays do change according to stock levels, and that sometimes other products do edge into the shop a little too much, but I move them away again.

To a point, this was true. There are merchandise stockers who bring the products from the warehouses, but they do also stock up the shelves. There were also shop designers who would come around occasionally and rearrange displays. Both of these people changed the way the products were stocked, but we also had an influence, as we had to stock the shelves on a daily basis. Technically, we weren’t supposed to move things around, but we did, just a little. The merchandise stockers didn’t care, but sometimes the designers would get a little irritated. They didn’t come around very often, but when they did you could hear them say things like “Who has put this here?” and move it. At the end of the day, though, we worked on the shop floor and knew how guests asked for things and what they wanted. Also, some products were connected and better displayed together (often guests would buy both), but sometimes the shop display designers didn’t get this. As we all know, sometimes things work well on paper, but less so in practice.

Continued in "Working at Disney's EPCOT During the Golden Age"!

Just because every guest is a "VIP" at Disney World doesn't mean the cast members can't have some harmless fun at the expense of the slower ones...

We did have fun teasing the guests. If they found out that I was sponsored by Twinings Tea, some assumed that I may have met the queen or had a link to the royal family. Some assumed that all the products on sale in the Magic of Wales were handcrafted in tiny village cottages rather than mass produced (and probably not in Wales). Some asked if Wales was near London, and some didn’t know whether England was west or east of the US. I think a lot of people perceived the UK as to how it was 50–100 years ago.(It probably didn’t help that we were wearing costumes from the past.) The level of naïvete about other countries at the time was shocking and quite worrying. I am generalising, of course, but it was all quite a surprise at the time.

It did mean we could have some fun going along with the naïve questions and expectations. I heard a colleague working in the Magic of Wales one day telling a guest how children still go down the coal mines and that some of the coal ornaments were made by those children, presumably once they had come up from the coal mines. I once discussed how I had met Princess Diana and been to lunch at Buckingham Palace (I never have, of course). It was probably an unfair thing to do, but when you get such naïve questions, it is always temping for our British humour. I know all the other countries had similar issues; however, in the UK pavilion we found the lack of worldly knowledge held by some Americans, at the time, quite amusing, whereas the French used to get very upset about it.

Of course, such international naïvety is not restricted to the US, but as this was a special cultural programme in a world showcase, any such lack of international knowledge by the host country will be all the more noticeable. I do get the impression that things have changed a lot in the past 20 years, and that Americans are now much more aware of the world outside their country.

Continued in "Working at Disney's EPCOT During the Golden Age"!