Then there were the operational errors. Disney's policy of serving no alcohol in the park, since reversed caused
astonishment in a country where a glass of wine for lunch is a given. Disney thought that Monday would be a
light day for visitors and Friday a heavy one and allocated staff accordingly, but the reality was the reverse.
Another unpleasant surprise was the hotel breakfast debacle. "We were told that Europeans 'don't take breakfast,'
so we downsized the restaurants," recalled one Disney executive. "And guess what? Everybody showed up for
breakfast. We were trying to serve 2,500 breakfasts in a 350-seat restaurant at some of the hotels. The lines were
horrendous. Moreover, they didn't want the typical French breakfast of croissants and coffee, which was our
assumption. They wanted bacon and eggs." Lunch turned out to be another problem. "Everybody wanted lunch
at 12:30. The crowds were huge. Our smiling cast members had to calm down surly patrons and engage in some
'behavior modification' to teach them that they could eat lunch at 11:00 AM or 2:00 PM."
There were major staffing problems too. Disney tried to use the same teamwork model with its staff that had
worked so well in America and Japan, but it ran into trouble in France. In the first nine weeks of Euro-Disneyland's
operation, roughly 1,000 employees, 10 percent of the total, left. One former employee was a 22-yearold
medical student from a nearby town who signed up for a weekend job. After two days of "brainwashing," as
he called Disney's training, he left following a dispute with his supervisor over the timing of his lunch hour.
Another former employee noted, "I don't think that they realize what Europeans are like. . . that we ask questions
and don't think all the same way.