Here’s Scott Gustin’s article about the new guidlines. No more taking up benches or other spaces guest need to use for seating!
In case you don’t want to read it in full…
Guest Pin Trading: Guest Pin Trading, outside of the use of a lanyard, will only be permitted in Disneyland Park near Westward Ho Trading Company, as directed by a Cast Member or a sign with the exact location, from park opening to 3:00 PM daily (subject to change).
Limit the Items You Bring: Only one trading bag, 14″L x 12″W x 6″H (36cm x 31cm x 16cm) or smaller, is permitted. Guests should only utilize a single trading bag for pin trading activities. No additional decorations or collateral (e.g., lights, signage, displays, etc.) will be permitted.
No Use of Benches: Benches or any other structures for the display of pins will not be permitted. Benches are for seating purposes only.
Attend to Your Items: Traders must stay with their items for the entire time they are displaying or trading.
Sad for the people who love trading that keep getting shuffled around. It has gone a little extreme though, but Disney keeps banning them from certain, some even very much out of the way, spots of the park & I think they keep coming back with a vengeance anytime they find a new spot.
The latest spot was a few benches right outside the main pin store near the Frontierland Entrance, some of them though really do come and setup “shop” with like 5-10 pin bags and cork boards that take up all the bench space (and yes, some bring display lights for the boards when it was dark). They banned them from using table spaces in a couple of different areas that they’ve kept trying to relocate to. Once one person comes with a couple of bags, a bunch more all start coming out & they do take up good space. Open up the Innoventions building/Star Wars area for trading!! Or the Tomorrowland Theater! Or the Starcade!!! Or the Fantasyland theater when there’s no performances for the day!!! They have so many spaces they could accommodate them without diminishing the park experience.
This is probably the best option, but then you have to staff it. Unfortunately, unattended people do terrible things!! They don’t want to pay employees for this…
Pin trading looks like fun when it’s kids casually swapping pins with kids & CMs. The Pros creep me out!! I’ve seen them at WDW come into the parks wearing T-Shirts that have all their personal “Rules” about trading printed on them. I’ve seen them take up eatery tables and benches when I needed a space for my family to dine. People say APs act entitled…these traders are the epitome of entitled sometimes… Sorry, but I’ve had a couple bad experience with these people in the parks…
It’s not 1999 anymore. The internet makes pin trading simple. Go online, join Disney Pin forum, make friends there and do the trades. Probably with way better results than random people…just guessing…
OR make the rule be that they have to wear them all!! You want load up your shirt, jacket or lanyard and be a mobile trader…go crazy! (I’m not serious about this last part - btw!)
Oh I hear you! We’ve seen a particularly intense one at DL make a kid cry about not getting too close to his pins that he had laid out in a spread. And there are plenty of frauds/scammers that get in the pin community so it’s SO hard all around. We don’t trade anymore, but we do still collect.
I do miss the days when you could be able to show up with your bag of traders and people walking around would stop and ask to see if they could trade & then you could go to whatever group of tables people were gathering at and do a meet-up & trade. We made some good friends meeting up & trading like that. Sadly, because of those intense entitled jerks, it’s ruined it. That and so many faked/fraudulent pins.
Yep. We traded with the CMs blissfully unaware that the majority of those pins were “scrappers” aka fakes but could sometimes tell that some pins were just a much lower standard/quality. We’ve tried to have lanyards that the kids bring but we only have real pins now and so are hesitant to put up any of our real pins and haven’t seen anything really good on the boards to exchange it for.
I am wondering where my little 6"x6" trading book falls, because I don’t do lanyards, but it is tiny.
Lol, there is definitely something in between this. Some of the people who run the lin trading sites created a lifeline for me and my daughter during COVID. And I know many of them trade in person.
The people who prey on kids and get them to buy new spendy pins to trade for cheap ones though, or make them cry - no good.
This is why I stopped trading. There’s plenty of non-Disney pins out there. Some are meant as pins honoring Disney, some are counterfeit. But with the thousands and thousands of pins Disney has made through the years, there’s no way to know if one is legit or not.
My son got into trading last trip. Just the scrappers with the CMs though. We didn’t really understand the real vs fake thing until talking to one of the guys set up in Frontierland. He was actually pretty helpful (if disinterested).
After the trip I bought about a dozen real ones that were on sale at Shop Disney. So next time we’ll probably still do the scrapper for scrapper trades but at least have some to potentially trade with collectors.
