When did cast members start trading pins?

Andrew Krieg wrote:
> I don't recall cast members trading pins with guests at WDW before. My
> last trip was 2 years ago. Is this something new or was I just
> oblivious? My kids loved it!

AFAIK, it started with the millenium celebration in 2000, but I could
ber mistaken...

Paul Lalli

Paul Lalli wrote:
> Andrew Krieg wrote:
> > I don't recall cast members trading pins with guests at WDW before. My
> > last trip was 2 years ago. Is this something new or was I just
> > oblivious? My kids loved it!
>
> AFAIK, it started with the millenium celebration in 2000, but I could
> ber mistaken...

That's just about the beginning of it. Though back then, the primary
thing they were trying to push for trading was cards. Not being worn by
CM's of course, this was done out of binders in the shops and resorts.
Forgetting about one loophole turned that into a nearly useless
activity before long, though. I don't know if that's exactly why the
card trading was phased out, but I'm sure it helped.

Switching the focus to pins, of course, brought many advantages. Easier
for anyone, especially kids, to participate, and able to make for more
interaction. One bit of apochryphal lore is that it was supposed to be
a temporary thing that would've been long over by now. If that were
true, I think it got too popular too quickly for them to have dared to
try. Plus considering what kind of revenue stream they are getting from
pin purchases now, how could they give that up?

Dollywood Hillery wrote:
> Pardon me for being dense, but what was the loophole (besides how hard it
> would be for guests to lug binders around the parks all day)?

No worries, I was being vague for the sense of brevity and left things
without detail. :)

The part of the card trading I had referred to was done from binders in
stores. Being busy shops, they were not usually monitored by a cast
member. The basic idea was the same as you see with the few pin binders
that are around now- if you saw a card you liked you would take it and
trade one of your cards into the binder to replace it.

So what was the loophole that they forgot about? When you bought the
cards they came in a pack- about 5 or 6 cards and a checklist card in
each pack. No one ever put any restrictions on trading checklist cards
as opposed to trading 'real' cards. So it didn't take too long before
the card binders became filled with checklist cards that people had
traded in to get real cards in their place.

An analogy in the pin world would be to imagine what it was like with
Millennium Dancer pins on cast lanyards up until a few months ago.