You’ve seen them in just about every gift shop on property, every attraction, character, and special event covered, and no doubt at least once you’ve gawked at the price tag associated with them – it’s ok, I used to do that, too! In my mind, pin trading was one of those truly crazy offerings at Walt Disney World that just seemed like it was designed specifically to scarf down your wallet in one fell swoop, and granted, that particular position on the subject hasn’t exactly changed all that much, however I suppose it is still important to mention that after one fateful weekend getaway in October 2006, suddenly those steep price tags didn’t seem nearly as cumbersome to bear…
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen – the column you’ve all been waiting for, even though I’m sure many of you would’ve never seen it coming from the likes of me – but regardless, this month we’ve going to talk about the addictive, expensive, and yet surprisingly enjoyable trend of Disney pin trading.
Of course, right off the bat I suppose I should mention that technically speaking, it’s not necessarily pin trading that’s gotten my fiancée and I hooked over the last two years … but we’ll get to that in just a moment!
I’ll freely admit that when I first came across them, pins just seemed like an insane waste of money, with their absolute cheapest running $6.95 and many limited and special editions pushing $10 – $12 or more, despite the fact that there I was, walking around the land where admission was $65 / day and a hamburger for lunch was $7 by itself! And mind you, I’ve had my share of collections over the years, from trading cards and comic books growing up to DVDs and coral reef collectable scenes more recently, so I could even understand the idea of dumping considerable amounts of money into one’s collection, but I think ultimately it was actually the whole concept of pin trading that came along with these $8 purchases that threw me for a loop. I mean, sure – I’d trade a card or two that came out of a pack that cost maybe three bucks total for something comparable, but to trade something that just cost me eight bucks, not to mention carrying around a dozen or so of them at a time on one of those goofy lanyards?! Sorry, just not my thing…
The pin that started it all for us...
Nonetheless, that whole experience changed a couple of years ago when my then girlfriend (now fiancée) and I spent a long weekend at the World to celebrate six months into our newfound relationship. It was a bit of a splurge trip – we stayed in a savannah-view room at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge and had an absolute blast watching all of the animals right from our room, we enjoyed our very first table service meal together at the Tepanyaki Dining Room in the Japan Pavilion at Epcot, and I really think the trip as a whole really helped us to cement our love for Disney as a couple as we proceeded to have a great time for the entire four days straight. Over the previous six months we’d spent a day or two here or there roaming the parks, but we did a whole lot of new things on that Animal Kingdom Lodge trip and one of those firsts that we stumbled upon, incidentally, was pin collecting.
Starter pins from our anniversary trip (on green background), plus a few others from 2006...
I believe it started the way I can only imagine that most folks get hooked on these things – Sara happened across a neat looking pin depicting the resort on our last run through the gift shop before checking out and thought it would make for a neat souvenir. Of course, when checking out at 11:00am, we still had nearly a full day ahead of us so we headed over to the Studios for the afternoon, and let’s just say in looking through the pin stands a bit more thoroughly than we might’ve before throughout the day, we ended up eventually ending our trip with a grand total of seven pins – three that we’d specifically chosen to highlight the trip, plus a special four pack depicting each of the four theme parks to help “jump start” the effort – and as they say, an addiction was born!
That was only a little less than two years ago and as I look up on the wall across from me, it seems that we’ve already built up quite the little collection. We may not buy our pins to trade, per se, but we’ve still managed to have a grand old time picking up one or two (or sometimes more…) here and there to help commemorate our various excursions over to the World, both big and small. For ten bucks or so each trip, we’ve found ourselves another way in addition to photos to keep the memories of our trips alive, to the point where these days Sara isn’t the only one scouring the racks for our next purchases! I must admit that I, too, have found myself bitten by the pin bug – I especially enjoy the passholder-only pins and also the pins released for special events throughout the year, such as the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival and all of the activities that take place at Christmastime. Maybe it’s an aesthetic thing, but they seem to really pull out the stops and issue some eye-catching merchandise for those events…
a trio of pins from 2008 Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival
Looking back at how I sort of disregarded pins in the past, I suppose I may have been a little harsh, although I still can’t say as though I understand the trading perspective of it … but to each his own. For us, we look forward to picking out a couple of pins that help represent the trip at hand – maybe an attraction pin for when we went over earlier this spring for the passholder preview of Toy Story Mania or a resort pin showing where we stayed if we spend the night. Last week, in fact, we even had a very special trip where we pretty much spent the entire day hunting for pins, a la the Find-a-Pin scavenger hunt of sorts that Disney introduced this year, releasing a new pin each month that offered up clues as to where the next month’s issue could be found. Boy, did we put in a lot of walking that day and we didn’t come away with every single pin that had been issued to date, but we still had a great time and I have little doubt that the remaining three will come our way via the wonder that is eBay before the end of the year anyways!
So to wrap things up, no – pins aren’t necessarily the $10.95 wastes that you might think, and in fact, for those that find themselves going as frequently as we do, they almost actually make sense as a worthwhile souvenir that won’t simply end up getting piled in the closet – really, how many plushes and picture frames and t-shirts can one person accumulate over the years?! Of course, don’t get me wrong, we’ve certainly got our share of those, too, but at least with the pins, we’ve got a nice collection that we can utilize for a nice stroll down memory lane any time we so desire – heck, only two years into our little journey and I already find myself doing that from time to time! As you can see from the picture below, Sara and I have come up with what we think is a pretty darned creative way to display our collection in our home, the only foreseeable problem being that eventually we’re going to run out of wall space and have to do some rearranging! But we’ll deal with that just fine, as I think I speak for both of us when I say that our collection will probably continue to expand and grow as long as we keep vacationing at Walt Disney World, to the point where eventually our children will also start adding to the wall their favorites when we visit as a family and introduce them to everything that Mickey and his friends mean to us. Talk about a pretty swell collection – I can only imagine what our wall(s) are going to look like twenty years from now…
Our pin collection through 2007...
...and "a portion" of our pins from 2008 waiting to go on the wall.
Maybe that’s the secret when it comes to buying pins – sure, they’re a bit on the pricey side, but really, everything is more than what you would pay at Wal-Mart for something similar … then again, you don’t see people planning for years and years to spend their family vacation at Wal-Mart! For us, pins represent memories of the magic that Disney makes us feel, and when you put it that way, $10.95 a pop doesn’t seem like such a bad deal after all.