At EPCOT today and

The sharks are out in full force! Makes me so mad. One lady has already scored TWO large pin trading bags with her selling techniques. One of the CMs was very upset that she was doing it and said that Disney is in the process of stopping the traders in EPCOT like they did at DTD. I come back in March. Can't wait to see if they are still here!

I don't understand.

Yeah, I'm not understanding what the woman was doing.

Saw some of those people too! A lady was there with what I thought was her grandaughter, and she was sitting in a wheelchair. She looked very old and had glasses on. The next day I see the same pin book as the day before, and the lady was no longer in the wheelchair, and had no glasses on as the day before. She also had the same girl with her, but this time brought what looked to be her husband as a partner in crime. Sickening! She traded about 5 or so Hidden Mickey pins to a tourist for around $100 in pins in the store that she went up and picked out. Just terrible!

OMG!!Makes me NOT to wanna go back...thats horrible!

Everybody trades differently. One persons value of a pin is not the same as all other traders. Just don't trade with those people that have a different trade value than you. If you have been trading for awhile, you know who trades like you do and who doesn't.

It would be too bad if pin trading was stopped at EPCOT. Once Disney gets rid of pin trading, people will lose interest and stop trading and buying pins.

If you don't like the way that lady trades, then take your pins out there and trade beside her. If tourists have more options for trading, they will learn faster about the differences.

Disgusting! That sort of so-called trader is exactly the reason that trading at DTD was stopped, doesn't look good for the rest of us later in the year

indy8888 said:

Everybody trades differently. One persons value of a pin is not the same as all other traders. Just don't trade with those people that have a different trade value than you. If you have been trading for awhile, you know who trades like you do and who doesn't.

It would be too bad if pin trading was stopped at EPCOT. Once Disney gets rid of pin trading, people will lose interest and stop trading and buying pins.

If you don't like the way that lady trades, then take your pins out there and trade beside her. If tourists have more options for trading, they will learn faster about the differences.

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Agree with the trading remarks which we as pin traders/collectors know how to approach, but here we are talking about the problem that some traders do take advantage of the "general tourist" who desperately needs 1 pin to complete a set or parents will pay out silly money for the pin or pins that their child will want to take home with them.

The sort of feedback that the CM would give to others will only damage trading at EPCOT - what happened at DTD should never be repeated BUT all the time that traders are their for their own "personal pin gain" (5 HM pins for $100 value is a COMPLETE JOKE!!) this will happen.

I've actually seen a trader unload his 4x4 with a mass of trading cases in the DTD Parking lot, carry these unassisted to a table, THEN jog back to the 4x4 & hop onto a personal ecv back to the tables where he sat from 9am till late - just my observation!!

I'm probably exposing myself to alot of heat here, but as someone who's relatively new to the hobby, I've wondered: what's wrong with asking someone to head into the store and buy some pins if they don't have anything else to trade? I mean, on the surface I can see how one would balk at the profit rates some of these sharks make - it can seem a bit extreme. But at the same time, everybody's getting something they want, at a price that each agrees to be fair: Disney sells their product at retail, the tourist obviously negotiates for a price they find to be reasonable, and the shark makes a profit. I don't see anything wrong with that. And when you realize that the alternative for the tourist is to go buy a starter set of 6-8 pins for, what, 25-30 bucks or more? And then spend time they don't have searching for particular HM's on CM lanyards they probably won't find? I can certainly understand why non-locals are willing to go in for the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong: having a wheelchair and "playing grandma" to try and seem unassuming is messed up and extremely weird. That blows me away and seems kind of psychotic. But to me, that's really the only element of deception that's being presented here. Sure, the tourist could wait until they get home and buy the pins they want off eBay for a fraction of the price, but everybody wants their magical moment at the park: they don't want it 2-3 weeks later in their mailbox.

I especially don't understand why Disney would discourage this practice. They're moving stock: seemingly much more stock in many cases than they would otherwise. At the same time, it seems better for the tourist's park experience and better for Disney as a brand if a tourist's choice in pins isn't limited to just what's on the racks that day. I'd imagine it would be frustrating for someone who's just passing through to see a bunch of pins they want, and then find out there's absolutely no way for them to get any of them (I know it was for me, before I really got into this hobby and had pins that were worth trading for). If there's a "slime factor" to the process that makes the whole thing unsavory, I can understand that as cause for complaint. But it seems to me that any "creep element" could be removed by Disney simply sanctioning the behavior and encouraging tourists to buy pins to trade with. That's kind of the whole point of pin trading anyways, isn't it? Buy pins, then go and trade them.

I'm a noob, so don't flame me too hard. I just really don't get why this practice is so frowned upon. It's about as confusing to me as people calling eBay "evilbay".

-JD

GLOOMY: I agree with your point of view. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with asking people to buy you pins to complete the trade. There are people who take advantage of this BUT my value of certain pins may not be how somebody else values them. That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, it makes them DIFFERENT.

indy8888 said:

As far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with asking people to buy you pins to complete the trade. There are people who take advantage of this BUT my value of certain pins may not be how somebody else values them. That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, it makes them DIFFERENT.

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The point is not that they value certain pins differently, it is that they KNOW the value of the pins, but boost up thr value through talk. They know that 5 HM pins is not much, but say things like "Oh, my pins here are worth this..." when they CLEARLY know they are not. THAT is the problem. If the person doesnt have pins to trade at all, fine. But as a pin trader, it isnt fair to take an unsuspecting tourist who just wants a vacation memory to the cleaners and have them buy $100+ in merchandise for something that isnt even worth close to that.

UFGators1234 said:

....it isnt fair to take an unsuspecting tourist who just wants a vacation memory to the cleaners and have them buy $100+ in merchandise for something that isnt even worth close to that.

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And that was part of the reason that trading at DTD was stopped overnight

I get the points of "just don't trade with them" and "if both parties are happy then what is wrong with it" but the problem is much much bigger than that.

Sure, WE can just not trade with them but WE aren't the target, tourists are. They have no idea that pins vary so much in value and when put on the spot they might splurge more than what they are really comfortable with because, hey, they are on vacation! But when they get home and see that they could have bought the same pins off eBay for $15 bucks, how do you think that is going to go over. They will be upset and may want to stay away from pins completely now. Disney needs to be concerned with this type of behavior. No pin sale is worth an unhappy customer. They would much rather have someone leave with a completely magical experience rather than someone that got swindled but bought some pins.

Another reason that this is a big issue is scrappers. When you see people using these trading tactics, do you really think they are moral enough not to but the cheap scrappers and then dump them on lanyards? Ever wonder how they got hundreds of hidden Mickey pins in the first place? THEY are the same people getting to the parks early in the morning, picking over the lanyard, dumping scrappers, and then trying to trade their new find for a $14 pin that they can sell on eBay. Just collectors not trading with them is not going to solve the problem. These people at the root are scam artists. If they put half as much effort into finding a real job as they do trying to rip people off then they would probably be better off...but hey....karma's a.....

Disney needs to seriously reimagine the lanyard process... Lanyards are nothing more than pin laundering tools anymore...

I was wondering why I didn't notice anyone trading in DTD like they had all the previous years i'd been there. Now I know why.

I've seen plenty of people with books sitting around tables and in all honesty it intimidated the hell out of me so I avoided trading with anyone that wasn't a CM. I've since learned not everyone is scary I don't see anything wrong with purchasing a pin to trade with a collector (i've done this myself once or twice to trade with a CM), but it is a shame that people are being overcharged. I can also understand why people will shell out $$$ for pins they can buy later on ebay for nothing - part of the fun is acquiring new pins while you're in Disney.

Or if you're me, part of it is frantically buying as many pins as possible while in the parks, because you know when you get home you're going to be scolded for spending so much money on pins :lol:

I can definitely agree that misrepresenting a pin's rarity or value in order to get someone to go buy pins is amoral. If somebody asks "how much is this HM worth" and the shark replies "THIRTY DOLLARS!" that's obviously not cool, and leads to reverse sticker shock after the fact. But does that really happen? If it's just hrmming and hawwing over "well, I think I'd need [x pins from inside the store] to do that trade," it doesn't really seem deceptive to me. That's kind of what trading and collectibility is about - giving more of what you don't want for a little less of what you do.

Erudolf hit on a big issue though, which is 50 cent scrappers being used to pick clean CM lanyards every morning. The entire HM program currently just seems to be feeding choice pins to a select few people. I've headed to DLR a few times hoping to score some HM's I want from the 2010 series (namely the Magic Mirror villains pins) and have never seen a single one, seemingly because a handful of traders go and swoop through the moment the gates are open. What have I seen? A ton of pins I now realize are scrappers.

As usual, it kind of all comes back to the fact that Disney needs to be doing a better job of shutting down counterfeiters and scrapper sellers. I've worked with collectible companies that have specific employees constantly taking in reports on illegitimate eBay listings and scanning eBay themselves, getting sellers banned and all of their listings removed within minutes of notifying eBay. Sports collectible companies do it all the time to protect the integrity of their product. But you can hop on eBay any given day and find not only counterfeit and scrapper pins, but unauthorized pins featuring Disney characters engaged in all manner of "not-family-friendly" activities. I don't get how Disney lets that stand. They have arguably the most valuable entertainment brand the world's ever seen, but they're not protecting it adequately? It's not like the markup on pins is slim to the point that they can't hire someone to take care of this - we know we're paying through the nose for this stuff compared to the cost of production.

-JD

indy8888 said:

GLOOMY: I agree with your point of view. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with asking people to buy you pins to complete the trade. There are people who take advantage of this BUT my value of certain pins may not be how somebody else values them. That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, it makes them DIFFERENT.

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If was truly about differences in value perception then I would agree, but that isn't what is going on here. When pertaining to these people, I'm going to have to raise the BS flag on that one. If it were truly about value perception then the person wanting a $14 pin for their hidden mickey would in theory be willing to TRADE a $14 pin for that hidden Mickey. Do you honestly think any of them would accept that offer??? No way! Even if it was a hidden Mickey they didn't have, they would never do that trade because they KNOW that the hidden Mickey isn't worth that. So, it isn't about value perception as all, it is about taking someone for all they can get.

I have no problem with people picking stuff out from the store, as long as the trade is FAIR. I've bought pins to trade with people that way myself, but I knew what I was doing and knew the values of the pins involved. There is nothing wrong with the practice itself, it is the abuse of the practice that we are really talking about here.

Erudolf - I'm not sure where you draw the line about what's "fair" though. I mean, some HM's are legitimately ten bucks lowest Buy-It-Now on eBay right now. I could definitely see trading a $14 pin for say, the 2010 HM Magic Mirror Chernabog as being fair. It's a $10 pin, and losing $4 bucks for instant gratification doesn't seem nuts to me. I think part of the problem though is that HM pins just have such a low perceived value to us because we know they're so frequently scrapped, or attained via the offloading of scrappers. If everyone had no choice but to trade $5+ starter set pins for each HM they had, the situation would be far different. But that can't be solved at this point - there are probably hundreds of thousands of counterfeit pins out there already, so even if production and eBay resale was halted, the problem will still persist. The only real solution just seems to be having pin trading in the parks supervised by a CM who ensures that nothing completely insane happens. While I'm fine with a decent level of profit for those who have big collections and have cultivated the hobby-specific knowledge, it definitely seems reasonable to me for Disney to expect pin traders to conduct themselves with some level of discretion in return for the privilege of in-park trading.

-JD

Gloomy said:

If somebody asks "how much is this HM worth" and the shark replies "THIRTY DOLLARS!" that's obviously not cool, and leads to reverse sticker shock after the fact. But does that really happen?

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Yes. Absolutely it does. They may not be able to get away with the $30 price quote anymore like they could in the past, but they will definitely try.

There was no specific price quote in this instance, but I once had someone at DTD try to tell me that a Haunted Mansion pin was really an LE 700 despite being marked LE 1000 so it was more valuable than an LE 1000. Now, we all know that sometimes pins get pulled from the shelves so it could have been true, but his reasoning was that 300 of them were actually in the framed Haunted Mansion framed set so there were really only 700 individual ones available. I mean, seriously.....that is just ridiculous. Feeding someone a line like that is just low...

Gloomy said:

Erudolf - I'm not sure where you draw the line about what's "fair" though. I mean, some HM's are legitimately ten bucks lowest Buy-It-Now on eBay right now. I could definitely see trading a $14 pin for say, the 2010 HM Magic Mirror Chernabog as being fair. It's a $10 pin, and losing $4 bucks for instant gratification doesn't seem nuts to me.

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I would call similar values "fair". But, in the Chernabog example you gave, I would still say that is a rip-off because there is one on eBay right now for 4 bucks shipped. I get your whole instant gratification thing, but when the price for it can swing from $4 to $10 in a blink, then that really gets fuzzy. Is the one on eBay a scrapper? Maybe. But a tourist that doesn't care that much about pins wouldn't know the difference and they would probably rather have a $4 scrapper then a $14 legit pin.

Yeah, that's pretty dumb. I really think that an overseeing CM could eliminate problems like that pretty easily.

I work in the Trading Card Game industry, and the main license I contract with had a change of North American distributorship two years ago. Basically, the licensing company found out that the licensee entrusted to sell their products was counterfeiting and doing a bunch of other stuff, so they took the license back and distributed the product themselves. One of the problems they wanted to address was the fact that sometimes, at tournaments, people ignorant of the value of their cards get massively ripped off in trades - especially kids. One of their solutions was to simply create a new policy threatening major ramifications for "predatory trading". Since the term itself wasn't specifically defined (despite lots of sharks wanting it to be), it put the fear of god into them enough that it's made a big positive impact.

I really feel like a single supervising CM armed with the ability to boot people out of the park / revoke annual passes for being complete, excuse the term, "trade bastards", would have a significant deterrent impact.

erudolf said:

I would call similar values "fair". But, in the Chernabog example you gave, I would still say that is a rip-off because there is onion eBay right now for 4 bucks shipped. I get your whole instant gratification thing, but when the price for it can swing from $4 to $10 in a blink, then that really gets fuzzy. Is the one on eBay a scrapper? Maybe. But a tourist that doesn't care that much about pins wouldn't know the difference and they would probably rather have a $4 scrapper then a $14 legit pin.

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See, I don't even think $10 is a big deal. It's when someone starts profiting 50, 60, or 70 bucks in a large multi-trade of low-value HMs where I'd be concerned. A $10 profit is "shearing a sheep" in my books. I'm okay with that. I don't mean to term tourists "sheep", but the point I'm trying to make is that the tourist survives relatively unharmed. A 50+ profit is skinning the sheep alive, which seems to stand a much higher chance of a post-vacation sticker-shock that damages the person's overall impression of their in-park experience, which is the real problem as far as I'm concerned.

Last weekend there was an issue at DLR with a person telling people to go into the store and buy multiple pins for one of his. A cast member came out and made an announcement that if that happened one more time all traders at Westward Ho would have to leave. As soon as the cast member left, said trader asked another person to go buy more pins.....It isn't much of a deterrent. I feel that our trading days in the parks are numbered due to this mentality...

Gloomy said:

See, I don't even think $10 is a big deal. It's when someone starts profiting 50, 60, or 70 bucks in a large multi-trade of low-value HMs where I'd be concerned. A $10 profit is "shearing a sheep" in my books. I'm okay with that. I don't mean to term tourists "sheep", but the point I'm trying to make is that the tourist survives relatively unharmed. A 50+ profit is skinning the sheep alive, which seems to stand a much higher chance of a post-vacation sticker-shock that damages the person's overall impression of their in-park experience, which is the real problem as far as I'm concerned.

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I just can't get totally on board with that reasoning. It is a bit of a double edged sword because in trading you always kind of want to "trade up" so you have to sheer some sheep as you say along the way. But, even if it is just one unsuspecting tourist, a $10+ gain on a hidden Mickey is outrageous. And remember, it is more like a $13.50 gain because they very possibly traded a scrapper for the hidden Mickey.

What about the guy in some large company who writes a program to dump all those remainders of pennies on paychecks into a personal account. Over the long run he could bank millions but he didn't really hurt a single person because he only stole fractions of a cent from each of their paychecks. Does that make it ok? No. Now, pin sharking isn't illegal, but skimming $10 off of each person rather than fractions of a cent seems more harmful to the "victims" involved.

I think we can all appreciate trying to gain a little (or at least not lose ground) when trading. But I like to look at it more like the stock market rather than gaining off people. Now, I trade differently when it is for my collection keep in mind, but when I am trading for traders I still try to keep the values in the 'fair range'. I'm not going to try and double my money or anything when the market says otherwise, but I'm going to try and make a move that will help me. For example, if I know someone that has something I want and I can trade for something they want, then I'll trade evenly for it. Now, when I do the second trade, I feel like I have gained because to me the pin I ended up with is worth more to me than what I gave up. All three pins probably have the same market value, but I gained ground.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is nothing wrong with sheering sheep, but there is a difference between sheering them and leading them to the slaughter. To me, $10+ profit on a hidden Mickey falls in the slaughter category.

AverysFairyTale said:

Last weekend there was an issue at DLR with a person telling people to go into the store and buy multiple pins for one of his. A cast member came out and made an announcement that if that happened one more time all traders at Westward Ho would have to leave. As soon as the cast member left, said trader asked another person to go buy more pins.....It isn't much of a deterrent. I feel that our trading days in the parks are numbered due to this mentality...

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This isn't really what I'm talking about. It's not a policy - it's just some dude making a heavy-handed, frankly way-over-the-top threat. It also doesn't take into consideration the concessions that could be made if asking people to buy pins was accepted behavior, either.

If the posted rules were something along the lines "You can ask people to buy pins to trade you; all in-park binder trading must be done in this area of Westward Ho; no predatory trading, there's a CM standing in the approved pin trading area; he'll kick you out of the park and/or cancel your annual pass if you screw someone over super-hard," it'd be a totally different ballgame. Making a vague threat towards all pin traders in the area, one time, verbally, isn't going to be effective. Vague threats won't solve this problem - policy and strategy on the park's behalf will.

Erudolf - You're literally comparing theft to profitable trading. I'm not sure that's the comparison you were trying to make, but yeah. Honestly, I think if someone is at a Disney park on vacation and is already paying hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars to be there, taking a -10 on a single pin isn't a huge problem. We can definitely agree to disagree, though.

Personally, I'm basing my opinion on my own perspective - if there's a pin I really want, I'll -10 for it. I'm relatively new to the hobby, and my budget for pin trading (and everything else in life right now! haha) is pretty small, but yeah. It's ten bucks.

Just to shift gears, another thing that can help solve this problem is simply speaking up. Flat out, if you're watching someone mize 100 bucks off tourists over and over, ESPECIALLY if they're pretending to be someone's sick grandmother, just go ahead and ruin their business. Let the victim know before they make the trade, "Hey, you know that's not exactly a totally fair trade, value-wise, right?" If they don't seem to care, then that's fine. But you'd be surprised at how often someone will respond and ask "Really? What are [x items] worth?" and then change their decision appropriately. There's no law that says we as traders have to put up with that stuff, and the tourists can always return the pins (I think - correct me if I'm wrong on that bit).

-JD

Gloomy said:

. One of the problems they wanted to address was the fact that sometimes, at tournaments, people ignorant of the value of their cards get massively ripped off in trades - especially kids. One of their solutions was to simply create a new policy threatening major ramifications for "predatory trading". Since the term itself wasn't specifically defined (despite lots of sharks wanting it to be), it put the fear of god into them enough that it's made a big positive impact.

I really feel like a single supervising CM armed with the ability to boot people out of the park / revoke annual passes for being complete, excuse the term, "trade bastards", would have a significant deterrent impact.

Click to expand...

Now this I agree on! 100% and that is one of the suggestions i have made to disney myself. Most of the regular cast members know who is a fair trader and who the sharks are and if they were to actually impliment this it would run off that kind of trader quickly and if we as fair traders were to keep an eye out and actually try and do something about those people by standing up and saying something to those being taken advantage of, we can run those people off too.