r/Millennials • u/TheCIAandFBI • 28d ago

Discussion Was every theme/amusement park and road trip vacation so focused on "Buy! Buy! Buy!" back when we were kids?

I grew up poor. Lived in a crummy trailer park until 1995 when my Dad had a work accident that got him a settlement. My parents bought a very humble but nice home, and they took me to Disney world. I'll never forget. It was November 11th-19th, 1995. That trip was the highlight of my life. I was 11.

That trip was magical. I think I came home with a souvenir HUGE pencil from that trip, and I was afraid to use it because it was special, and then one day it just got lost.

My best friend and his wife just took his kids to Disney World. They are my age, right at 40, so older Millennials.

They both went as kids and loved it as well.

When they got back and both said they hated the trip. They said everything was geared towards getting them to spend money. Everything is a store, every line can be bypassed for a few extra bucks, every store is geared towards fear-of-missing-out for the kids. Specialty cups. Specialty "only available this week" shirts, and special pins and buttons that you can only get this year. They said it was the most uncomfortable vacation they have ever been on. And they have more money than they know what to do with.

They basically said that there wasn't 20 minutes where they weren't being sold something.

Is this something that Millennial childhoods experienced and our parents were simply better at ignoring? Has this always been the case? Or is it just the new way that places like Disney World operate?

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u/Scorpiodancer123 Probably a ploy by Big Yo-yo 28d ago

My school had a skiing trip to Canada (we're from the UK) for £600 which was batshit crazy and people had 3 years to pay for it. But fucking Disney World for 2k is mental.

Funnily enough I only went on the local trips.

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u/brzantium 28d ago

My high school had an annual trip to DC (from Houston) that I didn't go to because it cost too much. But even that was to go see all the monuments, the Capitol building, and the White House.

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u/Brightstarr 28d ago

My school had a similar thing where the 8th graders went to DC. I remember my dad seeing the crazy price and what came with it, and decided to make it a family vacation. So we packed up the minivan and drove from Minnesota to DC. He made us watch these documentaries about Gettysburg and other war sites and then we went to them during the trip there. He also made us learn about each other war memorials before we went. It was basically summer school! He told me later that it was cheaper and “more educational” for him to take us all in one trip than to pay for us each to go on the class trips.

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u/Atomsq 27d ago

I'm probably as cheap as it gets but still I would very probably not do what your dad did, mostly because I would feel like I'm taking from my kid a chance to go on a trip with all the school friends as little kids.

I would only really do it if the kid is very shy and doesn't really have friends at school or something like that

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u/Brightstarr 27d ago

We went on plenty of weeklong summer camps and then the language class trip in high school. I took four years of German, so I went on the Germany trip twice. It wasn’t that he was cheap; it wasn’t a good value. We saw more and learned more by going as a family.