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DLR Pin traders disrupt traffic flow at DLR?

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DLR Pin traders disrupt traffic flow at DLR?
It is quite irritating when Disney promotes and sells pins at several different locations all over the park and yet they want to shoo us out of there so we don't interrupt the other guests?!?!?! Excuse me, but I am a guest just like anyone else that has stepped into the park so my needs should be just as important. I spend a couple hundred dollars on pins there a year and I have a year pass, so that soaks up more money. Don't dedicate certain stores to sell pins only and have all pins stamped Official Disney Pin Trading on the back if you don't want us to trade. They only care about the $$$$. Basically they are saying "Buy our pins, and GET OUT!"
 

Okay...I don't believe Pin traders were interrupting the flow of traffic at the Little Green Men store. If anything, pin traders were helping sales at this store, and I for one, did my best to be an ambassador to guests. As it applies to trading at the Mexican Restaurant tables...there, I can see how it might become a 'traffic-flow' problem. However, it's not like we are taking over the entire seating area.
I appreciate the fact that someone spoke for pin traders at the SHM. I also want to thank Janet for posting this excerpt. Pin trading is a fun, hobby. I enjoy it tremendously. I greatly miss not trading with guests who are new to pin trading.
 
I was there all day today and so no pin traders anywhere not even the pin trading wheel on the barrel in frontier land was there. They kept saying that the cast member was on break but we checked every hour or so and still nothing, we did find a couple of nice pins! No keepers though !
 
While I empathize with COLLECTORS/TRADERS who enjoy and seek out the trading experience, I was then and still am in favor of the unofficial pin trading areas being removed from the parks. For every one actual decent/honest collector/trader that is there on a daily basis, there are minimally 25-50 sharks. You know the ones I'm talking about, the people whose only job is to park their backsides at the parks and take advantage of new collectors, tourists or anyone that happens to have any interest in what they have in their books. They wont "sell" pins because they will get booted so they tell people that are interested to go into the store and buy them X,Y,Z to "trade" with them. Mind you that X,Y and Z are 99.9999% of the time worth far more than whatever it is that they are "trading" and they will be sure to tell that person that they are doing them a "favor" by even trading with them. Its sickening and I say good riddance.

I find it personally offensive to support much less encourage layabout lifestyles and especially those that prey on others. This racket is why the tables are gone, it has absolutely nothing to do with "traffic control" and I will bet dollars to donuts that the person making that stupid statement simply is unaware of the actual reason that the tables were pulled.

Disney does promote "trading" they have CMs doing it daily, they have PTN's regularly so screaming for support of our hobby is futile, they support it just fine, they are just bombarded with complaints about sharks screwing people over, treating them like trash (Mulanrocks is not alone) and being general eye sores to working class people that have likely saved up money from their you know REAL JOBS in order to take a trip to DLR and like me do not enjoy seeing those that pimp pins act like they run the park. They are rude, disrespectful, greedy, dishonest and of course NOT WHAT PIN TRADING IS ABOUT.

As mere visitors to the area the majority of us will miss being able to find other traders readily available but do you miss the sharks? Or is it that the sharks treat real collectors/traders differently? I know firsthand that when I did not have a lanyard on or an actual trading bag with me more than one "trading table" treated me so poorly that I wouldn't have urinated on them if they were on fire. Now fast forward two days later and I had both my bag and fat lanyard on and these EXACT same people greeted me like I was their long lost friend, asked if I wanted to see their "keepers" as well as there "high value traders" and of course if I had any blank.. whatever was hot at the time. So without those telltale items I was simply a walking wallet with ears but with the appropriate paraphernalia I was there best friend, sister or maybe just a hopeful victim. I'm sorry but I am of the belief that you treat EVERYONE the same. I would no sooner be friendly or kind to a celebrity, wealthy person or any other identifier of upper class people than I would be just as friendly and or kind to a person wearing grubby sweat pants, a vagrant on a corner or other seemingly identifiable signs that someone is struggling or even destitute. Money does not make you a better person, it just helps you have more stuff.

While I cannot expect everyone to treat everyone the way that I would, I can expect that when I take my family to DISNEYLAND that they will not become a mark for a dishonest and 100% of the time rude douche trying to make money off of us or others. At least when Disney screws you price wise, they smile, sweet talk you and make you feel like they are doing you a favor by charging you an obscene amount of money. I guess I like my shakedowns to include a friendly smile and not a surly demeanor that implies that I am interrupting something majorly important by talking to them at all!! If the shark tank knew how to follow those simple rules I guarantee you that they would still be there today. If the pin trading community as a whole was a source of awesomeness and was full of compliments about the treatment that visitors received, constant stories of being treated kindly and with respect, you can bet your balls that Disney would encourage it, I mean FREE employees spreading the "Disney Difference"? You bet, they would probably cut a whole in the fences to build an entire shrine to pin trading...its all about the bottom line and bottom line is if people are being discouraged from coming back because of a bad experience with a shark...guess who's getting the boot?

Here's a hint...it aint the person with the real job being asked to leave. Do I feel bad that the entire collecting community suffers because of the sharks? Yes I do. But we all know the power of a few bad apples spoiling the whole bunch. Every major recent pin release has shown exactly who these people are and what they will do in order to get as much for themselves and screw everyone else. Look how long it took to DSF to actually get it together enough to do raffles and the only reason that they had to do that was because the sharking of pins was causing the massive days long campouts on the alley!! If more than 50% of an available item especially in the minuscule amounts that are being made (LE300/400?) is being resold, price fixing is inevitable. You see it every single release. The main players set ridiculous prices as pre-sales and either stupid people buy at that cost creating a precedent for others to fall in line or they don't sell and they drop the prices. So because of Mr.Shark has set something at a $100 and he/she is getting it, all of the other traders/collectors that live close by follow suit and all of a sudden every single person selling or trading values that pin at what a greedy and unscrupulous person decides the value is.

Yes the market will only bear what people will pay but with all the fake ebay auctions to try and establish a base price, shilling and all around dishonesty it becomes impossible to know for sure until its too late in most cases. As I have said for over a year now, this hobby pushes out the very demographic it needs and without people getting into and staying in collecting it will only be people looking to buy or sell, the trading will be gone and the thing that has brought so many of us together will only rip us apart. How can you ask someone that you consider a friend to sell you something for $14.95 when you know they can get $100 for it? How does that person ever really make any friends if they are constantly asked for good deals?

Its a sucky situation and while I understand that everyone needs money...I value people and friendships more than a lot of other people do. I sell stuff at cost all the time. Every time I go to DLR or DSF I pick up anything, yes even LE's or LR's at cost. Every year that I have gone to SDCC I have purchased things for friends or even acquaintances including several people from this forum at cost but I have never, not once seen anyone offer the same. Yes people offer to get rack pins or other small things at cost (like we don't know about AP or cast discounts) that is not a regular thing and technically if you are making a 20% profit for doing nothing more than mailing something (you were going there anyway so stop with the parking, time etc.) you are not really doing us a favor so much as we are paying you to perform a service for us.

I'm just sayin.
 

The wheel was moved from Westward Ho to in front of the clothing store. I went a few weeks ago and saw different people manning the wheel so maybe it wasn't brought out that day.
 
Molly, those are some pretty harsh generalizations. I'm not part of the 'working force' right now due to medical stuff, but that certainly doesn't make me a shark, or someone who helped force pin trading out.
 
echoharmony said:
Molly, those are some pretty harsh generalizations.
Click to expand...

+1
If anything, back in the day of pin trading at the tables, I might've seen 3-4 sharks, but definitely NOT 25-50. Most people, even the sharks, were fine if I wanted to browse their collections. No one ever asked or suggested I buy a pin from the store for them if I didn't have anything to trade. Of course, I have heard and witnessed them asking/suggesting it to a couple other traders who may have had only OE or HM pins on them, but that was only 5-15% of the time I've been there myself. I agree it's the sharks (the bad apples) that spoil the bunch but I think instead of removing the tables completely, if any guest complained about them to the cast members inside the stores, the cast members should have walked outside and told them they cannot do that. If the sharks were warned enough, or even warned with the possibility of having their passes taken away (like how guests can be banned if they physically assault someone), the sharks might've stopped. If the sharks are "sharking" someone, maybe us "regular folk" should do something. Instead of being quiet, maybe we should actually point it out to the traders they are sharking. If those people are willing to trade (as they feel the retail value is the same, and don't care about the eBay value), then we should leave it alone; but if you can see that they're being taken advantage of, speak up. Maybe if we had "policed our own", the tables would've stayed.

I would like the tables back because you got to see "non-Southern California traders" trade too. Like from Japan, Hong Kong, France, and other places. It was one of the only ways to see other Disney pins that weren't available to DLR/WDW.
 
Well, even without tables I guess sharks are still a problem apparently. On the day of the PTN, I was CM pin trading trying to find 2 more HMs for my Just Got Happier set and an employee told me of how sharks are still bad at DLR/DCA, and she knew two locations where pin traders were trading. She did suggest I try them to find the last 2 pins though because I'm old enough to know not to get sharked and finding specific pins through CM trading is hard... I didn't actually try guest/shark trading at the parks because of the PTN later that night anyway, but I guess there still are sharks and stuff.
 
Seems the easiest solution would be to put trade tables away from the bigger pin selling stores. WDW example, the tables at EPCOT are buy one of the biggest pin selling areas at the park. When the tables were at Downtown, they were right in front of the big pin store. Take away the food and some of the sharks will leave. Supply and Demand.
 
I wonder why they don't bring the old DCA tables by Fly n Buy back. They were out of the way enough not to disrupt traffic, shaded, close to foot traffic, and by a pin store. I know people prefered to trade in DL, but now that DL isn't an option I think people would be willing to go to DCA. They no longer need the area for the Cars photo op.
 
@Echo....not sure what you think you saw there but you should take another look. I never, in ANY way suggested that you or ANY other CM's were anything but awesome...verbatim. Now you pissed me off.

@jazzy...The reason that I used that figure (not a literal 25-50 at the same time) was to give an estimated good to bad ratio of what I, friends, family and total strangers experienced at DLR over a two or three year period. Not everyone joins online groups, not everyone that has a shark experience will ever talk about it because that one experience pushed them away from ever doing anything more than trading with CM's.

No one wants to feel taken advantage of and certainly not put down the way I have personally experienced, seen with my own eyes and heard really nasty stories about. Like I said people that look like they are experienced traders were treated differently than people that looked like they were seeing pins for the first time so maybe you have never dealt with something like I am talking about.

I feel bad for the loss of the tables for the same reasons that everyone does, however I do not feel bad for the literally countless number of people that will not be shunned, harassed, embarrassed or taken advantage of. With the state of sharking right now and seeing the lengths that people will go to in order to make money I can only imagine what would happen if the tables came back. There would be sharks parked at them EVERYDAY in the hopes of trading away the scrappers that they buy in bulk to the newbies for rack pins or worse some older and super valuable LE pins that they may be unknowingly wearing.

Its a lose/lose for all honest traders but in the grand scheme of things everyone should ultimately want people to come to the parks and enjoy themselves. To see pin trading as what the majority of collectors do FUN and to not be run away from the hobby by douchebags that have zero ability to do anything but scam people or take advantage of the ill informed or newbies in the hobby. Its not ok to take advantage of people, I know for a fact that some people rationalize a very heavily favored one sided trade as a "good deal" I am of the belief that BOTH parties should get a good deal and I would never be able to live with myself if I paid $10 for something I know to be worth substantially more. Would I do that if the person selling it KNEW that it was worth more but still wanted to give it to me for that...of course.

Omissions are lies and if you fail to inform someone that what you want from them is ridiculously undervalued....you suck at life. Why people still don't seem to get this I will never understand. It should be a basic fundamental value...DO NOT SCREW PEOPLE OVER....even if you can get away with it.

I am truly sorry if you die hard traders are offended at my position on the tables, I know David was/is devastated by the removal and I feel bad for him. I also think that he is the kind of person that would care enough to see that potentially thousands of people were never mistreated so that he could have the luxury of trading in the parks a few times a year.....but he could be a total &*(% and not care at all.

:wavey: Get your Disney Difference on. Lets all sing Koombaya lol.
 
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Molly, your statements were very well said. I could not agree more and I don't live in CA, but Florida. And jazzytrumpet, you are absolutely that traders need to police themselves but don't. Pins are a minuscule part of Disney's overall income and if traders behaved better perhaps Disney would take more interest in them.
 
Molly, this is a problem that Disney created. Instead of them dealing with the people that cause the problems and ban them and take their passes away, they chose to take it out on all of us. So they are gutless wonders who still want us to fork over tons of money on something they produce and distribute and not let us enjoy our times at the park.

Yes I am pissed off about them taking away our tables and yes I have traded nicely with thousands of people and I know there are many more like me. We always met really nice people at the tables trading and yes there were also the jerks. Disney could have easily gotten rid of the jerks. When work got around they were banning people the rest of the jerks would get in line to do the right thing or face banning themselves. It would not have taken long at all.
 
Disney really doesn't seem to mind how the pin traders "disrupt traffic flow" at the check-out counter in the pin stores, now do they?
 

+1
 
I've been a casual pin collector since 2008... seriously got into it in 2010, and didnt start trading until last year when I discovered online trading. the #1 reason why I never got into trading in person? the pin traders were rude and mean to me.

Im not a "wahhh wahhh they're being MEAN to me, MOM!" type of person. I simply walked away. like Molly said, I'm from out of state, I can't visit DL nearly as much as I want to, and I wasnt going to waste my precious, magical Disneyland time on jerks. this was ages and ages ago, when the pin traders used to set up on the tables by the Jolly Holiday Cafe. I walked around, asked to look at pins, and was pretty much sneered at. I didnt have a lanyard or a pin bag (those things take up precious pin funds!), I kept my pins in my backpack. my husband (then-boyfriend) knew how much I wanted to trade, so he tried really hard to get the pin traders to even talk to us. no dice. I walked away and told him that I would only trade with CMs, because I didnt like how those people made me feel like I wasnt good enough.

I'm sad now, because I could have been a part of DPF years ago, if I had known about it. instead, I stuck to trading with CMs for ages, searching for pins that werent "junk" (which is what my husband and I called scrappers, cause we knew something was wrong with those!). CM trading was fun, but its not the great sense of community that there is here.

then, when I finally got up the nerve to trade in person at DL last year, near LGM, I got sharked really badly. the sharks flew to my pin book (finally broke down and got one) and while I only made about 4 truly terrible trades, I felt the the difference from being totally ignored to everyone wanting to look at my pins was too great, and I stopped trading. good thing, otherwise I would have traded ALL my good pins away. a nice pin trader who was there told me to look up my pins on pinpics, which I did as soon as I got home. I had stumbled upon DPF the day before that trip, so Im sure I would have been led to pinpics eventually, but that one trader who gave me friendly advice is the ONLY positive thing I can say about the trading tables at DL! I wonder how my experience might have been different... but I honestly think my story is very familiar to lots and lots of new and new-to-in-person traders.
 
I read this thread and was just shocked that this happenes at DLR. I knew there are the resellers, but this whole shark thing blew my mind. Just yesterday my daughter had her PTN Anna pin on her lanyard and on 3 different occasions a pin trader (shark?)with big bags of pins offered to trade her 2-3 rack pins for her PTN Anna. 1 even tried to pull out his Frozen Snowflake rack pin and asked her "wouldn't you rather have Elsa and Anna instead?" No big deal right? She can just say no if she doesn't want to trade like any other mature person would be able to do. SHE IS 4!!!!! I was right there and put an end to it put good lord it pissed me off. So in closing my rant... Molly while some people may agree with you, some may think you are way off, I would like to thank you for bringing attention to this issue.
 

Todd, just wow wow wow! I hope you put the Anna PTN with a locking back (or one of those clasp type backs)
 
@disney-fan...if you hang out here long enough you will see that I am infamous for calling it like I see it and I tend to get a bit rowdy when pushed. The people that have the problems with what I am saying are usually the people that I am talking about in a ummm not so nice manner. Between the sharking, the shilling and the all around dirty trading/selling it gets to be too much to bear and I really don't care who doesn't like it.

Unlike a lot of people in the world I don't have the ability to sit in silence, I'm not judging those that do as I see how distressing it is for some people to speak out even online. I tend to be the voice for a lot of those people and I hope that it's obvious that I am not hosting a pity party, I am only calling some much needed attention to the problems that plague this hobby. I hated reading your story and do not know how those skeazy people can live with themselves. Really try to snake a $100+ pin from a little girl for something that they probably got from a CM lanyard for a .02 cent scrapper!! (This is where all the filthy, and I mean really chock full of F words would be if I hadn't been scolded for potty mouth soooo many times) The nerve of an adult feeling that it's appropriate to initiate a conversation with a 4 year old kid much less initiate a trade....roundhouse kicks to the sack for them all!!

@chroll I'm so sorry that you were made to feel the seemingly universal sign of pin trading at the former tables.....crappy. I can only imagine how many other other potential traders have experienced that and said oh hell no and never looked back. I'm so happy you didn't RUNNOFT (do you get it?) because you are a wonderful addition to this community. Meanies suck!

@David....oh sugar how right you are. Unfortunately when it comes to banning people from the park it opens them up to litigation for everything you can possibly imagine. The answer that Disney will go to 100% of the time will be this #1 The safest way to cover their own asses.#2 the easiest way that does not effect their bottom line and #3 the solution that favors the most people aka the most money, not the most passionate people.

Pin collecting is a niche hobby at best. The majority of their pin dollars are made by random tourist that grab a few pins here and there or buy boosters to trade with CM's. The real collectors are only spending bags of money because we are stupid enough to pay inflated fixed and or fake prices for them on the secondary market. Come on LE400, 500,750, or even 1000 is virtually nothing! We serious collectors are less than 1% of the pin buying public and probably substantially less than that. We collectively hold zero leverage with Disney and if if every single die hard collector threatened to quit buying pins altogether they wouldn't care...not even a little bit. In all reality serious pin collectors are more trouble than they are worth I'm sure. The sheer volume of complaints that they have to deal with is enough to say screw this and prevent any private trading but they are Disney and want to be all sunshine and butterflies but when it gets to the point that it is effecting their money making machine...it has to stop. I would lay odds that there will not be another release like the Anna release at DLR again. The fact that they escorted everyone off property was more than a warning, it had the potential to play out very differently. The complaints about sharks, the complaints about kids being used as mules and the sheer number of people that showed up surely will scare them into revamping the entire thing.

I'm sorry that you and other good guys have to suffer but I stick to my guns on this one and say good riddance. I only wish that people like the dude that tried to get the Anna pin from Todd's daughter would in fact be banned. Matter of fact I wish that there was a way to directly report ANYONE doing scammy crap like that and that they would just ban all lanyard stripping douchebags from stepping foot on property at all.

Unless there is a collective agreement that we all stop buying from sharks these things will only get worse(I am certain this won't happen) I spent over an hour last night facebook fighting with yet another opportunistic layabout that was offering/begging to buy pins for you if you paid him a "service fee" which was double the cost of the pin plus his 20% PAP discount! The dude had no idea what he was talking about he had just seen pins selling on eBay for big bucks and joined a bunch of pin groups offering to do us a "favor" GTFOOH! As if charging double for a rack pin was was a favor. He also thought that he could just roll out to DSF and buy Olaf pins....it was really disgusting, very stupid and like every single one of my facebook battles the punk trick deleted his entire thread in fears that others would witness the verbal beat down that he received from yours truly. A couple people saw it happening, didn't say a word but messaged me to let me know I am awesome and he sucks...

Molly1000, bad guys ZERO.

Be be excellent to each other! :wavey:
 


Next time, ask to take their picture so you can post online what sort of "trade" they are offering... and see them run far far away from you.
 
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