Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
A former employee of Walt Disney World was sentenced to three years in prison for literally “hacking the menu”.
Twenty-seven years ago, I last visited Disney World. The menu was brought to you on paper. It was the same at most restaurants.
Modern restaurants have largely gotten rid of paper menus, although they might have one by request.
On my birthday, we went to a Japanese steakhouse. The food was excellent. However, I feel that for the price, they shouldn’t have required us to scan a QR code with our phones. It felt like we were at some tacky fast food joint.
With age, my eyesight has started to go. It’s not horrible, in general. I’m still legal to drive without my eyeglasses, but reading small print is getting difficult. In fact, I have my Web browsers set to blow up the text by 10% by default.
I have astigmatism, especially in my right-eye. This is easily corrected with eyeglasses.
However, reading is less comfortable than it used to be.
I find myself squinting at the computer when I leave my glasses in the other room. When I watch TV, I spray down and wipe my eyeglasses so that I can watch the movie in detail.
These “menus on a phone” are a real pain in the ass, and I don’t feel that a sit down restaurant where each person can expect to pay almost $70 for a special occasion should be reduced to fumbling with cell phones. It’s utterly classless.
It turns out that it’s also not secure.
Who would have seen it coming?
Disney does have amazing food, or at least they did the few times I was there in the 1990s. The Prime Rib at Cinderella’s Castle was definitely my favorite.
It’s also not cheap. They have you there. They know you’re not watching your pocketbook, and they know that people want “an experience”.
Well, they got burned for this. (Archive Today) As a former employee who was fired, “hacked” back into the third-party menu software that Disney’s contractor designed.
[Michael] Scheuer was later accused of hacking back into the software, where he made some pages inaccessible, changed fonts, and added profanity. He had also allegedly “manipulated the allergen information on menus by adding information to some allergen notifications that indicated certain menu items were safe for individuals with peanut allergies, when in fact they could be deadly to those with peanut allergies,” the complaint alleged. -WGN
He was sentenced to three years in prison. He was also ordered to pay Disney restitution of over $687,000 US Dollars.
Among some other changes, he edited allergen info, which could have caused somebody to die of a food allergy.
This would have been utterly impossible with a paper menu.
Why are restaurants, even Disney, paying for “menu systems”? They use “contractors” and “third-party software”. This adds needless complexity. It is an assault on persons with a disability. It also opens them up to problems if someone is harmed by a food allergen while in their park.
Well, digital menus solve some problems that we’re having in the national economy.
Prices for food are so unstable that paying a software contractor is cheaper than constantly printing up new menus (yes, things are getting that bad in the US, but there’s nobody left to report that).
Digital menus let restaurants respond to bouts of hyperinflation like we’ve been having under Trump and Biden. That means they avoid reprinting whenever their supplier says that input costs are increasing again.
It also lets them price gouge based on time of day, which is not an “inflation thing”, or an inherently “Disney” form of greed. (Modern Disney is unbelievably greedy.)
No, this form of greed is a cancer that’s plaguing the entire economy. Wendy’s announced it would charge more for food during the rush periods. However, due to customer backlash, it announced that it would not.
I wish that someone would pass a law making it illegal to not have paper menus. It should also be illegal to charge different prices at different times to different people.
You know, one price and everyone pays it, and it’s on the wall. Like what we had 20 years ago, and there didn’t even need to be such a law.
The solution to food inflation should be done at the national level.
If we had an administration that was even as competent as George W. Bush, we’d all be much better off than we are under Trump. He issues ridiculous tariffs that change seemingly every day.
The way things work under Trump now in the stock market, is basically this.
One day the stock market is down a million points. The only reason it’s down a million points is because of that horrible and incredibly stupid thing he just announced.
Then the next day it “rallies” by half a million points. They all clap like morons. This is because Trump says it’ll be less horrible than what he announced the day before.
Then the next day he announces something even dumber and it’s down a million points again.
Then the next day it rallies by half that, and they clap like idiots again, but this time it turns out to be because of something a fake account on X/Twiter said.
Meanwhile, it’s down a million points and they speak of “stock market rallies” even though Trump undid the last two years of gains under Biden, in only a month.
Peak Idiocracy.
My mother says “I don’t care what the markets do. I don’t own anything.” (Because she squandered it all on vacations and plastic surgery over the years, and getting divorced from ex husbands where she lost another house she plonked $50,000 or something into, and ultimately ended up bankrupt.)
Lost on her are the tangible reasons to be concerned about this for the people who are only trying to eek by. Little things, like what groceries cost, what cars cost, what fuel and electricity cost. Not all of which can or should be panic-hoarded.
She’s also unconcerned about Elon Musk calling for Social Security to be shut down and labeling it “a Ponzi scheme” and saying the only people who are having their checks cut off “deserved it”, because “I’m a nurse and can go back to work.”
She seems genuinely unsympathetic to the chaos and destruction she’s wrought, she and others like her, because she doesn’t empathize with people who will lose jobs or their home. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be them and she doesn’t care. This is a typical mindset for a Trump supporter.
But back to simple pricing, nobody really knows what things cost anymore because there’s no lasting evidence that it was ever any other way other than your own memory.
Have you ever made it up to the cash register and your cart came up higher than what you punched into your calculator? I have. We all have. At least those of us who try to keep track.
Those who have not “just looked away and slid the credit card until it won’t work,” or told the cashier to stop when it gets to…whatever amount just got loaded to their food stamp card, of course.
I don’t have food stamps. The government has me just where it wants me. Too poor to live properly, but doing “well enough” that it can lie and say I’m not stretched because of their fake and rigged poverty figures, which would be appropriate for, I don’t know, 1995 maybe?
If the poverty level quoted by the government was real, why do almost all government benefits use several multiples of it? That’s because they also know it’s not real. They just don’t want to admit that poverty is something like 30-40%.
Digital signage is a way to avoid labor and printing costs, and you use digital signage now whether you want to or not. Even Walmart and grocery stores are putting it in.
When Trump shits more tariffs out of his stupid mouth, your toothpaste that was 88 cents, then $1.99, then $3.87, can be $5.84. At every location, without sending an employee to relabel anything.
Your deodorant that was $2.98 can be $3.89, then $4.87, then ultimately $8.99. Check back tomorrow. Me? Personally? Well, I decided to buy a stick of deodorant and only use it when I have to go somewhere that I actually care if people smell me. Otherwise I just shower every day, scrub really well, shave the hair, and let whatever happens happen.
I also switched to a safety razor. I added it all up and we’re saving over $200 a year that’s not going to Gillette.
Even basic grooming supplies are becoming a hard sell, because it’s going to dig into my disposable income too much. Why should anyone have to pay over $250 for one person so they can shave and use deodorant over the course of the year. This is insane.
I remember when personal grooming was something you just rounded off in the budget. It was not worth tracking closely. It probably didn’t even amount to $5 a month, and that figure covered everything you needed.
Now you walk down the aisle and see a year’s worth of razor heads for $100 and you’re like “F–king Hell!”
If you have a baby, God help you. Infant formula that was already half the size for four times the price vs. 1993, can be $20 higher the very next time you’re out.
It doesn’t help that there’s only two companies left that even make the stuff, now we have a guy that knows science the same way he can’t tell his ass from next Thursday running the Health and Human Services agency. And he’s making a lot of unscientific recommendations for baby formula that will not improve health outcomes, but will make the cost go up again.
As you stand there looking at what you’ll have to fork over for Pampers and Similac this week, two off-duty cops stand there with guns waiting for shit to go down. (Paid by Walmart to intimidate their shoppers to the slow, slow pace of some muzak playing on the intercom.)
We truly live in a marvelous world, full of such wonders. Let’s see, revert to frontier justice after basic law and order breaks down because people can no longer afford shit that’s gotten way too damned high….check.
Republicans are all like: “Gee, why aren’t they f—king and making more worker-consumers? We’ve done so much for them. $1,000 to see a doctor for 10 minutes, $60 for a can of formula…no wait, make it $80! No child care. No paid leave. Minimum wage from when things cost half this. Immigrants should leave now and have a chance at living the American Dream someday!“
Walmart cops are like: “Pick up the formula!” I don’t want to pick it up, Mister, you’ll shoot me! “Pick up…the formula.” Ahh gee, I don’t want to fight you. “Pick up the formula.” *picks up the formula* BLAM! BLAM BLAM!!!
*Walmart Mercenary Cop blows smoke off the gun barrel and twirls it and shoves it back in the holster*
It’s like something out of a Western. It’s the shootout at the O.K. Corral, because of a can of formula. All that’s missing are the townsfolk disappearing and a tumbleweed rolling by, and some foreboding music.
(No wait, I’ve seen this! Is this the Clint Eastwood remake of Yojimbo where the guy’s shooting him and can’t figure out why he won’t stay down?)
It’s like the George Orwell Inflation Edition. They just burn the figure from yesterday and charge whatever the market will bear.
The only thing that’s better so far, under Trump’s second term, is that unlike in Weimar Germany, people won’t develop zero stroke from having to add endless strings of zeroes to things to deal with inflation, tariffs, and currency debasement.
Every time you go to the store it seems like your money is worth 10% less than it was last week. That’s because something like that is starting to happen.
Kevin Spacey really was over two decades early for what life would be like in 2025, in his performance in ‘American Beauty’.
I especially liked the part where his boss told him to write a letter about what he does at work. (Compare this to Elon Musk’s Five Things I Did This Week)
He gives up and turns in a letter that says his job “basically consists of masking [his] contempt for the assholes in charge” and that he “[retires] to the men’s room at least once a day” to pleasure himself “while fantasizing about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble hell”, and then he mouths those words as his boss reads them and gives the boss a weird little smile.
At least in 1999 you could earn enough money at work to come back home at night and eat some food, take a hot shower, and slip in front of the TV set to unwind, and go to bed, not worried about the doctor sending you a goddamn $1,000 bill for talking to him for 15 minutes about how your aluminum deodorant caused an underarm infection (necessitating the $8.99 trial size bottle of Dove), and your food bill doubling in only the last 4 years.
No, while Lester Burnham (Spacey’s character) might be relatable for those left in the middle class that are just having an identity crisis, his suffering is not for material want, it’s more comparable in some ways, perhaps, to that of King Lear.
As Spacey’s character grows more frustrated with the world around him, especially his frigid wife and particularly ungrateful daughter, his descent into madness and isolation begins. He withdraws from any semblance of responsibility to his family, which honestly does not deserve his hard work and sacrifice, and he ultimately retreats into his teenage years, which involve working a fast food job with no responsibility, buying the car he always wanted, but could never have, going out to the garage to work out and unbox his collection of vinyl records, and smoking marijuana.
Had he done that in protest of the world of 2025, you might not blame him.
In some ways, I think this movie appeals to people because we all want to be adults when we’re children. Children naively assume that adults lay down rules that are arbitrary and unfair, justified by “I said so.”, and that those adults aren’t also dealing with some idiots that there’s just no easy escape from. Then when they become adults, they wish they could retreat into a more comfortable era where they were shielded from the awfulness of the world.
In some ways, I’ve thankfully avoided some of the worst pressure and responsibility, parenthood. I just never saw a reason to do it. I knew how badly I was struggling. I saw rich people who paid me very little and then yelled at me for not working harder for the little crumbs they were giving me, and I wondered why anyone would do this to someone else.
This is the side of the world that you don’t see as a child. Nasty, predatory people. Bankers, politicians, landlords (they’re twice as bad as anyone else), dirty mechanics, salesmen, bosses. They all have something in common. To do those jobs well, you have to be without conscience.
Once I realized that life in the United States is essentially a gigantic crushing wheel designed to rob us of our dignity and then leave us to die as soon as we get really sick someday, I decided “Wow, this is incredibly horrible! Who would even want to have kids here?”
Most Americans carry around a health insurance card that doesn’t actually work when they get sick. There’s a $10,000 deductible and when you get to that, it makes up unlimited excuses about why they’re not paying the bill, and then you get to live on the phone and filing appeals papers.
I watched Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Opus last night. He recorded it a few months before he died of cancer. It was sad, but I was thinking “He was in Japan, so they probably did everything they could for him at least.”
Sadly, the worst people are literally running everything in the country now.
The only person in the Trump Administration who is competent and somewhat normal is the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, which nobody is listening to.
Trump’s inner circle claimed that they wanted to cause the 10 Year Treasury rate to go down, which is understandable. It would make mortgage rates more reasonable and prop up the housing market, which is now choking on unsold inventory that sellers are delisting so they don’t have to admit that there’s nobody who can pay it.
The 10 Year is going up, because after saying they wanted it to go down, they immediately started the dumbest trade war of all time, sparking a Dollar crisis, wherein China and Japan are no longer willing to humor us, and are beginning to demand payment in full on more bonds that come due.
Who needs a currency peg if there’s not going to be much trade? Much worse will happen, but this is not “making the market take medicine”, it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head of the economy that’s only beginning to make its presence felt.
The real shock will happen when they start having failed Treasury auctions.
This is all on top of the fact that the scum and rats and cockroaches have taken the last 5 years as a license to steal whatever they think they can from you.
Even our landlord is not worried about leaving us anything for next month when he raises the rent.
I recently watched the movie “Seven Samurai” (the Criterion edition), and commented in Techrights that “My landlord is worse than those bandits that keep raiding the farming village. At least they’re smart enough to leave enough of the harvest behind that the people don’t starve to death and become unable to produce another crop. At least the villagers could hire Samurai to deal with the bad guys. I don’t think that’s legal where I live.”
Hell, those Somali pirates have nothing on this guy. He too appears to be using some sort of “rent demand pricing” software that suggests what to charge people.
Like an idiot, he’s done everything it said and half the building’s vacant and he has a hard time finding tenants that can pay. He’s losing more money than the last landlord was, who at least knew not to demand Mouton Rothschild prices for a box of Franzia.
Nobody is going to admit what we all know is going on.
Who, in a government that insists that ICE can knock down your front door without a warrant (Archive Today), because it feels like it, would tell you the truth about inflation, even if there was someone who was honestly trying to track what it really is? █