I feel like they are trying to drive out individuals that have shares and make it more corporate - 1000 is ridiculous.
Out of interest - what have peoples returns / dividends been? I've never been in the position to buy shares until now (I'm 22) so it would be good to know if people have / are likely to make a profit?
As never2old has said, no dividends as such - they use the Starbucks accounting method - any "profit" goes straight to TWDC to pay licensing fees.
Our rationale for joining was, we buy shares for £x, reap the benefits of being a club member, then if needs be we sell our shares for £x - no profit, no loss, no dividends, just benefit from discounts and muffins.
The reason that the number of shares needed to be a member has gone up is because the share price went down and because £1 was worth more ten years ago than it is now, consequently as prices have gone up, you save more money in discounts (and the cost of muffins has gone up!).
(I'm guessing here but) you used to have to hold 20 shares at around £8 = £160, then the shares went down to around £3, so they upped the number to 100 = £300. People are expecting / guessing the required holding to go up to 1000, with the share price at around £1.
When we first bought shares, we saved the entire cost of the shares by buying two annual passes.
