This is a Disney Dollar.
You can tell it’s not a real dollar because Mickey Mouse has not been elected President
of the United States.
But it's not a fake dollar either—this was a real form of currency that saw use for nearly
30 years.
You see, Disney has a very weird history of treating itself like a government—and in
fairness to them, that’s because they literally are a government.
At least in this part of central Florida, where they can manage their own utilities,
issue themselves liquor licenses, and, when the time comes, exercise their legal right
to become the world's tenth nuclear power.
But, since running an autocratic government in the middle of a swamp can get kind of old,
Disney decided to take the next step in the late 1980s and start their own currency.
Now, this raises a few questions like, “are you actually allowed to do that?”
and… well, that’s the only question.
But the answer to that question is kinda complicated.
You see, the US constitution basically just has one vague little sentence about who can
print money, and it shockingly doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of a privately-owned currency
printed by a cartoon duck who—guess what—was not even born in the United States.
But the consensus seems to be that you can distribute your own private currency, if you
throw about a hundred asterisks after that sentence.
One of these asterisks has to do with how people perceive the currency; if there is
any way that someone could confuse it for government-issued money, then the government
would issue you… a bonk on the head.
And this has happened—in the mid-2000s, a guy named Bernard von NotHaus started printing
and minting a new currency called “Liberty Dollars.”
Now, these weren’t all that different from other small-scale community currencies like
Massachusetts' “BerkShares” or New York’s “Ithaca Hours,” but the problem was that
too many people thought they were official US currency—after all, they were called
dollars, used the dollar sign, said “trust in God,” came in the exact same denominations
as US currency, and the coins looked exactly like US coins except they had Ron Paul’s
face on them.
And because these two middle aged men didn’t look different enough, the Liberty Dollars
were deemed counterfeit and…
I was going to make some joke about “NotHaus ending up in the nuthouse,” but really he
just ended up in federal prison.
Now, the other main restriction on private currencies is how they can be used.
Disney was not the first company with the bright idea to make their own dollars—that
actually started with the coal mining companies of the 19th century.
But those coal companies weren’t making their very own coal bucks as cute souvenirs
to remember your time down in the coal mine, they were making them to screw over the proletariat.
Basically, since the mining camps didn’t usually have much cash on hand, they would
pay their workers with their own made-up currency instead; this currency could only be spent
at their own stores, and those stores just happened to have terrible, super-inflated
prices.
This also made it basically impossible for any of the miners to leave, because they had
been accumulating their life savings with what were essentially just Chuck-E-Cheese
tokens that could only be spent on bread at a single tiny shack somewhere in rural West
Virginia.
Now, these currencies were called “company scrips,” and they were enough of a problem
that Congress had to pass some laws to stop companies from paying their workers with them—nowadays,
it’s still legal for a company to create a currency, but that currency has to be easily
exchanged for real money that can be spent outside the company.
So, basically, as long as Disney didn’t pay their own employees in Disney Dollars,
and as long as Disney Dollars couldn’t be mistaken for real dollars, the government
couldn’t do anything about them.
With those two restrictions in mind, the Disney Dollar was born in 1987, coming in denominations
of one, five, ten, and fifty.
The idea was pretty straightforward—you could buy or spend Disney Dollars in any territory
of Mickey’s empire; namely Disney World, Disneyland, Disney stores, Disney cruise ships,
and on Disney’s private island in the Caribbean… which is not technically subject to the laws
of the United States, but it turns out that the Bahamian constitution doesn’t say anything
about privately-owned mouse money either.
The value of these Disney Dollars would be pegged one-to-one with the US dollar, and
because of the law I mentioned earlier, all of these locations would be legally obligated
to buy back any Disney Dollars in exchange for real money at any time.
Now I know what you must be thinking: “If Disney had to offer me real money for my Disney
Dollars, wouldn’t it be super easy to just counterfeit the fake currency and then use
it to drain Disney’s enormous coffers to buy myself a jet ski?”
And that’s a great question, but the answer is no.
It turns out, Disney Dollars were incredibly well-engineered, and had most of the counterfeit
protections that real currencies have; they used the same intaglio micro-printing process
that the US dollar uses, scan-resistant reflective ink, hidden watermarks, and even unique serial
numbers that indicated where they were originally purchased.
Also… glitter, cause maybe the counterfeiters didn’t have a Michael’s nearby.
Despite their success, Disney eventually discontinued Disney Dollars in 2016.
They didn’t say why, but it was probably because no one carries large wads of cash
around crowded theme parks anymore unless they’re trying to make a generous donation
to the local pickpockets.
Nowadays, Disney resorts have all sorts of futuristic payment technologies that make
it way easier to pay for things and way harder to tell how much money you’re wasting to
stare at the backsides of an Iowa family for an hour in line.
For legal reasons, Disney still has to accept any Disney Dollars that are still in circulation,
but you’re probably better off cashing them with Disney adults instead.
So, depending on where you live, it’s probably been pretty darn cold out lately.
It certainly has been in the where I live, which has made me especially glad that I use
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I’ve actually been using Hello Fresh for a long time—almost a full year before I
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They’ve made it so much easier for me to eat healthier, cook faster, and spend less,
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