Pin Collecting

Being a Management Scientist at Disneyland is a lot like being an engineer on a tour of NASA – you spend all of your time looking around you going “Whoa! These guys are good!” A lot of it is obvious, like the line management techniques. True, other theme parks also get people to stand in a line for two hours waiting for a three-minute ride, but Disney invented most of these ideas, and refined most of the others. It’s amazing when you see things like the “new” submarine ride – basically a fifty-year-old idea refurbished with current technology (robotics, animatronics, and so on) and then marketed like crazy.

Or consider the food service operations. I’ve been through other theme parks, water parks, zoos, aquaria, athletic stadiums and convention centers, and it is my observation that Disney not only processes more people through the chow lines in less time than any other venue under the sun, but they also sell a better grade of food. This is due in part to recruiting and training a better grade of personnel, employing better team efforts, and designing better facilities. However, it’s also due to ideas like the “food package” concept: rather like a “value meal” at a fast-food stand, most of the park’s food service operations only sell food in packages (e.g. an entrée, a side dish, a roll, and a drink) for a fixed price, and only offer five or six of these packages. Having fewer menu choices means that fewer items have to be fabricated, and people don’t need as much time to decide.

Of course, the packages aren’t a particularly good deal for some guests, particularly given the sky-high pricing of everything at Disneyland. But with no real alternative (eat here or go home) most people pony up for the food packages anyway. However, none of this compares to the pin-trading scheme. This is built around the little cloisonné pins of the various animated characters that have been staple souvenirs for generations. The pins themselves have always had a certain following who collect, display and trade them, but they have always been a niche specialty, without the vast appeal of say, balloons or hats with Mickey Mouse ears on them.

The Disney people have come up with a new wrinkle, however. They sell nylon lanyards specifically made to display these pins, and packages of 4 or 7 pins to start your collection, in shops all over the park. What they’ve done is to issue lanyards and collections of pins to various park employees (or “cast members”) and then encourage visitors to trade pins with the employees as well as other visitors. Since pins from any Disney facility in the world are in play, people take every opportunity they can to stop cast members with pin lanyards, just to see if the employees have something from another Disney facility (in another part of the world) or a pin from prior years that is no longer being produced to add to their collection.

Since all of these “pin trades” are made one-to-one, you have to have a supply of pins of your own in order to make trades. Since the pins average $6 to $10 individually (or a pack of 4 for $20) and the average visitor will need around 10 per visit to made trades with, the Disney people have effectively increased their income per visitor by something between $50 and $100 each. Of course, there are some visitors (like me) who don’t collect pins, but we must be averaged against people (like one woman we met from Santa Ana) who come to the park every week and buy 20 to 30 pins on each visit.

And the really beautiful part of this scheme is that it costs the Disney Corporation almost nothing to pull it off. Most of the employees they have trading pins are actually doing other jobs, stopping to swap pins only when asked to (the cast members can’t refuse a trade request from a guest). The exotic pins (from other parts of the world or other years) are brought in by the guests themselves, requiring neither fabrication nor inventory control. And the cost of fabricating new pins is so low that not only are the sales nearly pure profit, but the Disney people can afford to bring out new pins and “retire” old designs regularly, giving new visitors something to buy and trade with, and old visitors something to return and trade for.

It’s ingenious, and vaguely disturbing to watch in progress. Which leads me to the same comment I made on the last post: “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”