I paid happily.

This is what I do for a living. I know exactly how the margin on a Baby Yoda toy works. And I paid happily anyway.

I've spent years in retail. I know the trick. Water costs cents and sells for dollars, the Mickey ice cream bar must run something like a 90% margin, the whole park is engineered to make you open your wallet without thinking.

I should be immune. I wasn't.

Last day at Disneyland. Bags packed, and we showed up late to a character breakfast at Storytellers in the Grand Californian. The kind of situation that anywhere else ends in "I'm sorry, you've lost your reservation."

Not here. The cast member just solved it. No drama, no making me feel the mistake. She sat us down and that was that.

And that's when it hit me: in the entire trip I hadn't questioned a single price. Absurd churros, wildly expensive Cokes, all of it. I paid happily.

Pure price inelasticity. And I fell for it anyway.

Fewer people, spending more, not complaining

Disney's results confirm it. Last quarter, spend per visitor rose 5%, driven by food and beverage. Attendance fell 1%. Fewer people, spending more, not complaining. The experiences segment made US$10 billion in operating income last year, at a margin above 27%.

You don't build that with discounts. You build it with how you make people feel.

Will Guidara put it plainly in Unreasonable Hospitality: run 95% of your business down to the cent. The other 5%, spend "foolishly." That 5% is the smartest money you'll ever spend.

You can match a price in a day. You can clone a promo in an hour. But a person who leans in, looks you in the eye, and solves your problem without making you feel bad about it? That doesn't come from a system. It comes from a culture. And culture takes years.

That cast member fixing our late arrival was the 5%. And that 5% is the hardest thing in the world to copy.

In Chile it's even harder

We're trained for "it can't be done," for the manual before the person. And to be fair: there's also a certain consumer cunning that makes it risky to give the sales floor real discretion. Extraordinary service swims against the current from both sides.

I'm not writing this from the stands. I'm writing it from the field.

This week a review came in for one of our stores: "terrible service, you have to wait around, and when I left they laughed." One star.

It breaks my heart every time I read one. It's the opposite of what we lived at that breakfast.

I don't have it solved. I'm far from it. But I'm doing everything in my power to make those reviews rarer and rarer — and to make sure our customers actually get the 5%.

In the age of commoditization, where the product gets matched and the price goes transparent in one click, the only thing that doesn't get commoditized is how you make someone feel.

The Mickey ice cream bar has a 90% margin. But the real margin — the one nobody can copy — is in the person behind the counter.

I know how the trick works. I paid happily anyway.

When was the last time you happily overpaid, just because of how you were treated?