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A Different look at Disney...

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After numerous visits to our favorite Disney resort, be it Disneyland or Walt Disney World, we frequent travelers run the risk of becoming hardened in our viewpoints. I'm as susceptible to this as the next person. For instance, I consider FastPass a blight on the theme park experience, just as others consider it the single best theme park invention in many decades, and online disagreements about this topic get more heated than just about every other topic out there.

There's an old adage that you cannot convince anyone to change their religious or political opinions via online argumentation. The back-and-forth disagreements just grow longer and more detailed, but no one is convincing the other side, since by nature our opinions just get firmly entrenched on these two issues. In the theme park world, FastPass is as close as we come to this kind of closely-held belief. Not that it stops me from every so often trotting out the rationale against a ride-reservation system anyway!

There are similar kinds of issues all over the parks. Perhaps it's inevitable that when someone like me visits all the time, judgments get made. I wouldn't say they are snap judgments; in fact, they are often formed after long exposure to the issue. Examples might be character buffets (good for families seeking characters, bad for food variety in the parks), the Disney Dining Plan (bad for menu choices and menu prices, since the restaurants have little incentive to excel), money spent on "insignificant" theming (good for everyone, except perhaps the accountants), or recycled floats in the parades at the Magic Kingdom (obviously, another bad).

But every so often, I run across a topic that I had mentally placed into a certain category, only to discover some time later that it may not be so bad after all. Or more likely, that it may be ideally targeted to another segment of the visiting population, and I just wasn't the target audience before. Even I soften my viewpoint on some things! One of the prime instances of changing my mind came in the form of PhotoPass. I was skeptical in just about every way previously. I mean, it was always free, and remained free, to just hand your own camera to a nearby Cast Member and you could have a family portrait. I was incredulous that Disney wanted to charge a bunch of money for something that, in this era of digital photography, is so easy to be free. Also, I resented that the PhotoPass people were seemingly everywhere and seemingly always in the way. What a useless service, I often thought to myself.

And yet, over time when I saw it used and spoke with people (some by email after their trip), and even tried it myself a few times, I became won over. Granted, I've also talked with some folks who assure me my first thought was right, that the program is a major ripoff. It's too expensive for what you get, they say. But others assure me that once they arrive home, they are so nostalgic for the amazing trip they just had, another $20 souvenir seems not just reasonable, but downright desirable. Especially one that captures the entire family as a single photograph. It helps that the photos are delivered in high resolution, taken with the right amount of flash, and framed by someone with experience, someone who does it all day long. Others rave about the convenience of the program. You get photos added all throughout your trip to the same card, and can look it up when you get home. There are doubtless those who just leave the camera at home and let Disney do all the picture-taking. That would get expensive, but convenience is the point.

Changing my mind about PhotoPass was a gradual process, and it never really upset the apple cart all that much. Recently, however, I experienced a reversal that was sudden and unexpected. The issue in question? Pin trading.

I know that pin trading was popular with some folks right from the start when it burst onto the scene in the late 1990s. I grew up loving lapel pins, so I liked the blossoming of choices in buying such pins, but I never quite understood the trading part of the phenomenon. It seemed to me that if I wanted a pin, I would buy it. Why would trading be necessary? Or on the other side, if I was buying a pin, why would I need to buy two of them? The general way it works is that you're allowed to buy two pins: one to keep and one to trade. But trade for what? I'm already buying the ones that I want. The answer was that pins were released in limited quantities, an artificial manipulation of supply and demand to create excitement and drive business. I've never been able to prove it, but I've always thought the Beanie Baby craze of a few years prior, which had similarly been fueled by intentional manipulation of supplies, inspired the Disney Pin Trading creators.

I was cynical not only about the origins, but the rollout as well. Within a few short weeks, placards and signs blanketed the parks about Disney Pin Trading, and it was seemingly given all the marketing of a major park attraction. Meanwhile, over on eBay (whose meteoric rise was also occurring right around now), Disney set up shop officially and sold plenty of items directly to customers. And in each and every transaction, even ones having nothing to do with pins, there were obnoxiously loud banner advertisements and whole paragraphs about the Disney Pin Trading concept. It was marketing overkill, an example of über-synergy gone awry, and it actively turned me off something I might have otherwise considered.

Then there was the invasion of the parks. Pin trading stations were set up here and there, sometimes off to the side of the park, but sometimes centrally located, such as in front of the fountain at Epcot. Here, people congregated and seemed to spend hours just examining each others' collections. It looked friendly enough, but it also seemed chummy and clique-oriented. After a few years, I learned there was an entire subset of pin traders informally known as "sharks" who preyed on pin newbies that had no idea they were in possession of valuable pins. Sharks would score a great pin and trade away an insignificant one, banking on their superior knowledge of these collectibles and limited releases, about which the newbies seldom had enough information. Trading itself wasn't morally wrong, but giving misinformation to secure a one-sided deal was another matter.

Not all of the pin trading fanatics were sharks. But many were indeed fanatic about the pastime! I watched incredulously as these super-collectors gathered around tables, sporting enormous assemblies of pins, stuffed into bulging zippered folders that encased the wares in plastic pages, allowing for protection and easy display. It struck me that this hobby must not be an inexpensive one. Some of these folks had literally thousands of pins, maybe even tens of thousands, and each pin must have cost between $5 and $10 (closer to $10 these days). Many of these folks were completists, and would not rest until they had every last missing pin. It seems like I see fewer of the completists at the parks these days, but admittedly I haven't paid much attention.

This was the context of my mindset until a couple of weeks ago, when my wife suggested out of the blue that we let our five year old son try pin trading. I think I literally rolled my eyes at the very notion, but then shrugged and figured it couldn't hurt much. It did seem like the sort of thing he might like, but then again, with young kids you never know. So it was that upon our late morning arrival to Epcot that Sunday, we found ourselves looking at the starter kits for sale in the central pin trading booth near the fountain.

To make a go of pin trading, you really only need Disney pins, but a good majority of the CMs with pins and the casual trader sport lanyards, onto which the merchandise is pinned. So we needed a lanyard. We settled on a $25 package that had a lanyard and four Disney pins. Most pins are $8 to $10 (or even $12) by themselves these days, so we figured that was a good enough bargain. The pins that came with it were themselves duplicates, illustrating the concept of "one to keep, one to trade away." I think we had two of Mickey with Donald, and two of Mickey with Goofy. My son traded all four of them away.

He latched on to the program like a child possessed. His zeal rivaled the light in his eyes he displayed when he first became tall enough to ride Test Track, Space Mountain, or Expedition Everest. He was really excited! He led us around from person to person, shop to shop, food cart to food cart, all the while looking for the next CM to trade with (we didn't seek out regular guests to trade with, and no one approached us that day, either).

He was so into his new hobby, we barely went on rides that day. It's true that we are locals and don't face pressure to rush around to hit all the attractions, but whenever it's "his" day (we sometimes let him be in charge of the whole day's decisions), he always dictates that we go on ride after ride. Not this time. Apart from Test Track, he was content to eschew attractions and instead find ever more CMs to trade with. I was unprepared for the outpouring of grins, the bounce in his step, the fervor with which he examined each new pin and his clear excitement when we spied a new CM with a lanyard from a distance.

It was obvious from the beginning that his zest derived from the trading itself. For whatever reason, he liked owning new and different pins, even if for only a few minutes. He only had four pins and if he was trading with a new CM every few minutes, that meant that he cycled through each one in much less than an hour, but this seemed not to bother him one whit. He was clearly not approaching this from the "collector" mentality, but the standpoint of excitement about constantly owning something new.

It crossed my mind later that week that pin trading of this variety may be exercising a particular kind of mentality on his developing psyche, one where ownership is measured in ever shorter terms, permanence is an ephemeral abstraction rather than a fact of life, and perhaps even the entire notion of emotional attachment is different from previous generations. After all, this is the era of rental DVDs in the mail (we have a Netflix account that we use partly for his movies) and rental videogames in the mail (we also have a Gamefly account, and he gets occasional games from that, too). Media moguls tried, in the Napster days, to argue that future generations want to rent music rather than own it. That turned out to be wrong for music, but the general notion about rentals might not be so off-base when it comes to the Millenials and the next generations.

Even better, I mused, was the impact on the bottom line for my family. If "trading" does not translate into "collecting," then the status quo might be able to persist for some time without need to inject more money. Unlike Netflix and Gamefly, this program doesn't have to cost me more money every month. I'd already bought the lanyard and some pins, and the rest was now free. Not bad!

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© 2008 Kevin Yee

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