Alright, home. So Soda Fountain. There's some weird interconnection with Ghirardelli now, so it's now the Disney Studio Store Hollywood & Ghirardelli Soda Fountain, I just will refer to it at "DSF."
So when DSF opened in 2005, they started selling a small collection of pins, being that pins were the trinket of choice for Disney to hawk at the time. And they started selling them in the quantities that the parks did, so LE 1000 and above. Well, being the store was small, a long way from the park, and in Hollywood, it didn't really get a lot of traffic, so they started bringing sales back down to match demand. A smart thing at the time. So edition sizes came down to LE150-LE300 per pin. Even at that price, many things hung around so, if you were a pin collector that lived out of the area, after 2 weeks or 30 days, you could call up, and get what you wanted shipped to you. They also, to increase food sales, started offering something called a "Pin Trader's Delight" PTD's which was a sundae that came with a free pin of a character having some sort of ice cream treat. These were also LE300, and would take a month to sell out.
In the rest of the pin trading world, people were more focused on pins sold through Disney Auctions and DisneyShopping.com. Eventually Disney stopped producing pins through those venues, and people wanting to trade for the old stuff, needed a new LE source, and suddenly DSF was discovered. Things escalated quickly with lines forming for each release, and since people were there, they started buying the PTD's, so those started turning over in a week, then 3 days, then 1 day, then multiple times per day.
People started lining up overnight, and then they announced some stupid voucher system which didn't eliminate the line at all...instead people started lining up 3 days before the vouchers were released, and then had to come back the next day with their voucher. Yes, there were campouts for 3 days, in the middle of Hollywood for LE300 pins. And the manager would do nothing about it. They had to hire additional security, and fights would break out among the pin people, and the pin people and the homeless population. Knives were drawn. About the same time that, not associated with the pin thing, a tourist was killed and I'm guessing at that point DSF was told they had to do something. So now the system is the way that sports teams sell playoff tickets, or concert tickets sometimes. Everyone shows up the morning the pins are sold, everyone gets a voucher with a number on it, and then pins are sold in order of voucher number.
Back to the PTD pins (the free ones). Because these also could be flipped for a quick buck, people would bring their friends to buy multiples. People couldn't eat all the ice cream, so they started handing that out to the homeless people hanging outside. Then some people figured they could also pay the homeless people to get in line to and give them the pin. The biggest scalpers, would hang out all day in case the pin flipped to a more desirable character. It got to the point where if you WANTED to eat in the facility, the whole bloody point of offering them in the first place, you couldn't order one of these things because they were only selling them to the people in line. Once Ghirardelli took over they started instituting daily limits, and some crazy rules where they offer 4 pins at a time, and you can buy 2. The pins don't reset until all 4 are sold. This has limited the number of people that hang around the store all day, but they still exist.
So you would think with all of that going on, they would do the smart thing and increase the edition sizes, right? Well, not really. Many pins are still LE300. They do sell more LE400s and 500s and very, very occasionally a Frozen LE750 pin. The manager has been asked, and she's terrified that if they increase edition sizes that it will go back to the old days, where pins sat on a rack for months and had to be marked down to $4 a piece to get them to move. Since the bulk of the store's sales are made from the pins, she can't risk her gravy train coming to an end. Many of the people in line, are Ebay resellers and can't even identify the character or movie they are buying pins from. And here's an example of the ridiculousness. For the 2nd Frozen release, 1945 vouchers were handed out to purchase pins with LE sizes of 300, 400, 500 and 750. So most people that showed up, went home completely empty handed. What's that about dollars flying over their head?
