The Concierge Culture

Here’s a terrific piece of journalism (gift link) by a former management consultant about the transformation of the Disney parks from a pricey splurge for the American middle class into typical instances of what I’m going to dub the “concierge culture.” The concierge culture means that if you’re in the upper class — say the top 5% and especially the top 1% to 2% of American households in terms of income and net worth — you just buy your way out of all the many inconveniences and frustrations associated with social life in general and mass entertainment experiences in particular.

The gist of the piece:

One of the economic puzzles of the past five years has been the persistence of serious consumer negativity at a time when nearly everyone has a job, median household incomes are historically high, and we are spending more than we did before the pandemic. Yet all but the most affluent are seemingly not happy with the economy or their place in it.

We all judge our well-being against something, typically our past and our peers. Through either of those lenses, the Disney parks — and many similar institutions of American culture — may offer a piece of the puzzle. Compared with the past, a Disney trip is more expensive, to be sure, but perhaps more important, it feels much more expensive, because at every turn one is being invited to level up and spend more. Thanks to social media, we can now see the experiences that divide us. Go to Instagram and search for #Club33, the invitation-only clubs hidden within Disney properties. What you see there will not make you feel a kinship with your fellow man, unless you are one of the very few invited in.

America’s 20th century was a fortunate moment when we could rely on companies like Disney to deliver rich and unifying elements of our culture. Walt Disney hoped that his audience would have “no racial, national, political, religious or social differences”; he wanted to appeal to everyone, in no small part because appealing to everyone was profitable. It was a time when big institutions were trusted, and the culture they created was shared by nearly all Americans.

The economics of appealing to the middle class aren’t what they used to be. The market, and increasingly the culture, is dominated by the affluent. And technology is enabling companies to see these previously invisible class divides and act on them.

Based on what we earn, we see different ads, stand in different lines, eat different food, stay in different hotels, watch the parade from different sections and on and on. What’s profitable today is not unification. It’s segmentation.

The concierge culture is closely related to Cory Doctorow’s key concept of “enshittification,” as well as to the now pervasive dominance of the smart phone culture and the mining and exploitation of personal data that this culture enables. Most of all it’s related to this stat, which startled even your not-humble correspondent, who deals with these issues constantly in his work and life:

In the 2020s, however, the growing ranks of the affluent presented a profit source that could not be ignored. According to Datos Insights, in 1992 there were 88,000 households worth $20 million or more in 2022 dollars; by 2022, there were 644,000. Those who could pay almost anything for a vacation were becoming their own mass market.

That’s a 632% increase in constant inflation-adjusted dollars. And we’re not talking about a comparison between now and when Warren Harding was president — we’re looking at the change between the year Bill Clinton was elected and the present.

I’ll reference a couple of personal experiences in regard to what this story is critiquing. (Side point: the NYT still does some really great journalism for all of its failings as a political institution).

Preparatory to anything else, feel free to STFU about how you couldn’t be paid to go to Disney World etc. That’s not my thing either: my thing is sitting in an icy rain packed together with 110,000 other people at Michigan Stadium in November to spend four hours (formerly three; see enshittification supra) watching Michigan play Ohio State, an experience which I would guess 95% of you would consider a living hell, but for which I will pay an absurd and vastly inflated above what it was a generation ago price. Also too, anybody who reads the Times story and feels inclined to engage in some fat shaming will get their ass banned as a result so consider this fair warning.

Speaking of that inflated price, I first went to Michigan football games as a kid in the early 1970s, when Michigan student tickets were easily obtainable for $2 — $15 in 2025 money — meaning I could pay to go to a game with some lawn mowing money. Today, it’s difficult to impossible to buy a student ticket if you’re not actually a Michigan student, because of the surveillance culture and the algorithms, and a regular ticket is almost always going to be burdened with the hidden cost of a seat license — a concept that didn’t even exist in 1973 — so the real price of a typical, far from premium, ticket is going to be a couple of hundred bucks, while a good ticket is two or three times that. A luxury suite — another concept that was non-existent in my younger and more vulnerable days — can be rented for $100,000 plus a year, tickets and parking not included. (The university’s administration refers to the latter option primly as “enclosed seating.”)

Meanwhile I’ve been rolling around in the law school cost data again over the past couple of weeks, and check this out: essentially half the students at a school like Columbia pay CASH for the cost of attendance, and their typical cost of attendance is going to be around $300,000 all in, parking also not included. Half the law school is made up of “kids” whose parents have $300K more or less lying around to buy their special snowflakes debt-free Columbia law school degrees. The other half of the class is going to be servicing hundreds of thousands of dollars of high interest non-dischargeable debt. Columbia is a super elite place, so the percentage of The Quality v. The Groundlings is roughly 50/50, unlike the rest of America where it’s more like 5/95, as the story lays out. That’s the concierge culture in a nutshell.

I’m more or less on the border of that 5/95 divide here inside the Boulder Bubble, which is a kind of Disney World of its own, and I constantly feel if not exactly poor, still strained and stressed by the economic realities of living with a bunch of extremely rich people. This is the experience of being in what could be called the lower upper class, and its the epitome of a First World Problem, but it also gives me at least some sense of what actual middle class people are now facing in a culture in which everything is increasingly designed to cater to a small slice of their fellow citizens who can buy their way out of anything resembling a democratic experience. (This very much includes things like necessary medical care, not just entertainment and so forth).

This creates a lot of rage and frustration, which in turn helps explain, as the NYT story suggests, why everybody is so frustrated and angry all the time, despite soaring real incomes in historical terms, plus the Door Dash app on your phone, along with the instantaneous availability of any song or movie or Michigan football game you want to watch etc. etc.

And all this –and “this” is ultimately the core of contemporary culture — also helps explain, via complex and twisted paths no doubt, why we’re living in Trumpland at the moment and for the foreseeable future.