Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2015-01-29 06:52 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-01-29 06:52 pm
[ SECRET POST #2948 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2948 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #421.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Collectibles
Re: Collectibles
Re: Collectibles
But yes! So any castmember with a lanyard is open to trade. Some castmembers have green lanyards that only kids can trade with. There are certain pins that are only given to castmembers, so the only way for collectors to get them is to trade with castmembers/trade/buy them off people who have traded with castmembers. In addition to wandering castmembers with lanyards, any shop that has a "pin trading post" sign, will have a small board that people can trade off of.
Castmembers aren't guaranteed to have these "castmember only" pins though because they are constantly trading back and forth with guests all day. As long as it is a Disney pin, they can't refuse the trade (limit = 2 per guest per castmember a day). My sister and I once made a single loop around California Adventure (about 20min) and one shop's small board had a bunch of new pins.
There is only one problem amidst all this fun.
FAKE PINS (AKA SCRAPPERS) FROM CHINA.
Because legit pins are made in China, various Chinese companies will either steal old molds after Disney tells them to get rid of them or make their own. They'll sell them in bulk to random USA buyers who in turn sell them on ebay for tourists and parents who'd rather pay $0.50 per pin vs $5-10 per pin. But you get what you pay for. The scrappers are rougher around the edges, have dips in the paint, miscoloring in certain sections, don't have the gloss of a real pin, etc. Once you know what to look for it's painfully obvious.
Even that though wouldn't be SO bad if there weren't so many of the same scrappers. A castmember's lanyard usually has about ten pins; you'll be lucky if you find ONE that isn't a scrapper. And also like I said, certain pins get copied over and over and over again (easier molds?), so you'll tend to see the same scrappers over and over and over again.
For example, here's a random google images photo of a bunch of scrappers:
http://i.imgur.com/PQJumM8.jpg
On it's own, doesn't look TOO terrible as potential trading material, until you realize a bunch of pins could also look like this:
http://i.imgur.com/62SyEPZ.jpg
And that's just the surface level of interesting vs not interesting. Most scrapper lots that people buy look like the first picture, and then the pins that they trade with cast members are the least interesting of the lot. So yeah, that yellow pendant/flag and the lanyards and the two monorails and the black ones with the outlines of the girl and the cat? I can't even BEGIN to tell you how many times I saw those on cast member lanyards.
Personally, I grab from eBay too, but I'm good at phishing out the fakes from the real ones. Like legit pins a family bought ten years ago and is now selling them to get rid of junk. Every so often people liquidate their collections. I'll usually get mine in lots from anywhere to $1-3 a pin. I recently grabbed a lot that was about $8 a pin, but they were all limited edition, so I'll probably keep half and resell the others individually to break even.
But yeah, the way my sister and I had the most fun (I should say, we've only been to Disney once after I officially started collecting), was to grab our own lanyards of my cheaper pins (the $1-2 ones) and just trade for anything that looked somewhat interesting. At the end of the day, the pins we got were probably a little less valuable than the ones we started with, but I honestly wasn't losing much and we could tell that the cast members appreciated my pins after countless trading with the same scrappers. (A lot of them can tell, but don't want to face complaints/possible firing if they refuse a guest and it "technically" has the Disney logo on it.) Several made the remark that they'd never seen the pin I'd given them before.
That made me feel good.
Re: Collectibles
By the time they introduced the pins, I had stopped going to Disney as often. We went to Disney World in 1991, 1995, 1996, and 1997, then I went for school in 2003. I went to Disneyland for the first time in 2010 and then again in 2011 and went back to Disney World in 2011.
There's a big difference between the knock offs and the official ones, thanks for the pics. I can also imagine the cast members see a lot of the same ones over and over again.