Shanghai Disneyland opening driving cost-cutting measures in the US and Paris parks

That's crazy. Cost of living is slightly lower in Dallas compared to Orlando, and the salary calculators put housing as 20% cheaper. And no snorting pixie dust required!

Wait... You went to In-N-Out and didn't tell me?

As someone that's been a part of hiring for part-time jobs in DFW for the last 18 years (with the same company), that is not anecdotal at all. Competition for part-time workers is as brutal as it's ever been and that's going on 2 years now. We hire 5 and 10 walk out of the door. And of the 5 we hire, only 2 or 3 are actually motivated to work. After bumping our starting pay rate up $0.15 per hour every January for the past several years, we stepped out this year and bumped it up a whole $0.50 this year. It didn't make one bit of difference. The full-time market is a little more in favor of employers.

Gonch - How did you like the 7th Street area in Fort Worth? It's one of the booming areas of town.

That whole 7th Street area is really nice. Very clean, new and modern.

We've been surprised in general by what we've seen down here. Very nice and nothing like the Texas stereotypes.

If you have time, go to the Magnolia area on the Southside. It's the most unique area of Fort Worth. People will tell you ten times over to check out the Stockyards (still worthy of a visit), but I would tell someone to first check out Magnolia.

You were literally 5 minutes from my house, Gonch. :-P Yeah, Fort Worth and Dallas aren't like typical stereotypes but the housing market here is still super-duper cheap. The 7th Ave. area has been recently redone and is full of yuppies and hipsters (I assume TCU graduates, but I have no idea). It's the area that 20-30's think is great and 30+'s think is ruining the city.

I'm surprised they don't pay in double-doubles. ;)

Can we get back to the "puppy kicking satan worshipers" topic? This intrigues me.

Oddly enough, I live on Magnolia (well, 2 blocks away) and I just don't seem to get down there too much. A lot of the places people are ga-ga over (Yucatan Taco Stand, Spiral Diner) I just don't get much out of. Where's your stomping grounds, bigboy?

I live up in the HEB area, but I work near TCU. I'm not much of a fan of Spiral Diner and I can take or leave Yucatan Taco Stand (you can get a lot of their menu at Fuzzy's, both started by the same chef). On Magnolia, I like Cane Rosso, Benito's,and Lili's. Temaki Sushi was good, but I think it closed. Not on Magnolia, but my recent favorite is Salsa Limon. They started as a food truck, but they have a few permanent places now. I started working in that area 18 years ago and I'm amazed at how the south side has started blowing up, especially the area to the east of the hospitals.

I didn't get a chance to check out the Magnolia area but my wife absolutely loved the area around 7th street.

Like I said, we were surprised by how much we liked the greater DFW area in general. I suspect the one major downside for us would be temperature/weather. (weather is never a dealbreaker, but it can be a tiebreaker if there's a choice to be made)

We've always followed opportunity and now, at the very least, we know that should opportunity present itself in that neck of the woods, that it might just be worth chasing.

ApolloAndy said:

Where's your stomping grounds, bigboy?

The 12 year old in me keeps hearing this in my head like a bad pickup line.

Speaking of Texas weather, two weeks ago we got a gigantic hail storm which totalled my car and the roof on our house. We weren't in town at the time, but egg sized hail was reported. It was super localized to a couple square miles which I guess is good? Unless you're in that area...which we were.

And I do love me some Fuzzy's. (Note: This is also not a pick up line).