Wanna do Disney? Hate lines? Try Hire-a-Handicap!

It's capitalizing on market inefficiencies.

 

In a less sensitive age, the headline would have read "Rent a Retard"

 

For the life of me, I have no idea why they would go to that effort and expense.

Put an Ace bandage (or, if you have access to one, some kind of removable cast) on your leg and rent a wheelchair at the gate. It's shitty, but people do it all the time. (At least they did when I worked at Disneyland in the 80s, and I can't imagine that's changed.)

I even had co-workers who pulled the wheelchair bit on their days off.

 

Hurricane season runs six months. June through November.
All the kiddies are back home and in school after Labor Day.

 

My wife is a paraplegic, courtesy of a car accident when she was 20. If there's one good thing about it, it's that we get to skip a ton of lines.
Airport security lines? We get waved through the handicap line. A 45-minute wait becomes a 5-minute process.
Tourist attractions? You get waved along and even get some sympathy from security guards, whether you want it or not. We went to Chicago last year and circumvented an hour wait at the Hancock Building. We got on the back of the line and the security guard brought us up to the front.
It's offset by a lot of accessibility issues, of course, but it's certainly a nice societal "perk," for lack of a better term.

 

I don't feel too strongly either way on this, but it did remind me of one very great thing:

 

Bump: Disney ends lines for the disabled.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/us/article/Disney-changing-line-jumping-program-for-disabled-4836991.php

 

But enough about NCAA academic testing procedures.

 

I covered marathons for a few years and learned that, in the wheelchair division (the "roller" division), one does NOT have to use the wheelchair as a primary mode of transportation.

As I rode the course with the camera, I kept thinking...

"10 grand for the wheelchair winner and there's only seven participants in wheelchairs?"

Although, I thought it would be somewhat tacky for a person who can actually walk to win the wheelchair division and then hop up on the chair at the finish line and throw his hands up in the air in triumph.

 

Years ago I covered a college that had one of the nation's best wheelchair basketball programs. I was talking to the SID about it once, and he recalled the first time he attended the team's awards banquet. When they announced one of the winners, the player stood up and walked to the podium to receive his award. The SID said he couldn't believe it. He told me, "I wanted to jump up and shout, 'It's a miracle!' "

He soon discovered that, as exmediahack pointed out, you don't actually have to be confined to a wheelchair to compete in wheelchair sports, and quite a number of this university's wheelchair players could in fact walk without one.

 

You can pay for VIP access where they give you your own guide and you can bypass all lines. I think it's $200-$300 an hour for a minimum of six hours. I can't imagine being rich enough where I would be willing to drop that kind of coin at an amusement park.

 

That does not sound too bad. You can't even get a good attorney for that hourly price.