OpEd: It’s time for Limited Edition to die.

First, this is not an attack on collectors. This is not an attack on those that genuinely want a product and will pay crazy prices for it. If I am attacking someone, it’s directed at those in charge of merchandising for Disney and the use of “Limited Edition” to boost sales.

LoungeFly bags have been a Disney thing for years. For the most part, they are women’s backpacks that are decorated in different ways, and notably, for this article, with Disney designs and characters. They put ears on a lot of them, and they are cute, they aren’t badly priced (usually between $75-90$), well built, and have quite a following.

A new collection, the Minnie Mouse collection, popped up in ShopDisney stores during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a man, I laughed because they put a bow on it and called it Minnie Mouse. My other half feels different. The Minnie Mouse collection has been wildly popular, so much so that ShopDisney created the MerchPass for it; a lottery of sorts to get a chance to buy the bag on release as opposed to fighting off automatic bots that buy all the stock… the problem begins.

The issue with Limited Edition does not start with the LoungeFly Minnie Mouse collection, rather it starts many years ago in pin trading.

Disney Pin Trading was a favorite thing of ours for many years. Disney made pins, some were buy the ones you want, others came in a mystery pack and you had to either buy a lot or trade others to get the whole set. It was either expensive, or fun. Whatever you made of it. But they made thousands of them, so the pins didn’t hold lots of value. Completed sets did. Adding to the fun, Disney started doing Cast Member sets, where you had to trade Cast Members to get them; they did not sell the sets.

All was well, and then Disney did something you’d expect any for profit company to do, they made a move to maximize profits. They created Limited Edition pins. They even sold pins on eBay themselves that weren’t available else where, and these pins commanded a huge price. Lots of these pins still hold quite a bit of value, but some didn’t and the craze died.

Limited Edition started showing up on lots of merchandise. Some of them were specific number release sets, some where time-limited, such as Food & Wine Passholder pins only being available for Food & Wine, and for Passholders, for that year and then that was it. The specific number releases usually had the copy number and the run number on them, creating some rarity for die-hard collectors. And this worked well for years… until around 2008-2009.

Now we can speculate what the root cause of this was. Was it Passholders losing the jobs and looking for a new source of revenue? Was is ticket price increases requiring Passholders to find supplemental revenue in the form of buy park items and selling them online? Was it just greed? Who knows, but the issue started, and snowballed.

It became common during the opening days of EPCOT festivals to see people carrying tons of merchandise bags out of the parks, at about 10AM. It became common for the specific number release items to sell out within days of the event starting. And it became common to see park merchandise on eBay with markups of 200% and more. It was annoying in the beginning.

Fast-forward a few years, and lets get to the Rose-Gold Ears. Yup. Those baby’s. These weren’t even a limited run, and people showed up to the parks and bought them by the hundreds. Disney sold out of the ears in a day. A day! More were on the way, but they were on eBay for $100-$200. Not a bad haul for a product that cost $19.95 in the park. It would be months before the stock replenished in the park. I do applaud Disney for how they handled this, sort of. They filled every store with them, posted pictures of the overstock on Facebook and Instagram to show you could get them from $20, forget the eBayers.

We didn’t see this happen again with regular stock items. But Limited Edition continued. When items started popping up on ShopDisney first, eBayers got creative. They employed computer bots, or automatic software to do a job faster than any human, to purchase items in droves. Limited Edition items would sell out on ShopDisney in seconds. Yes, seconds.

To fight the bots, Disney brought out the MerchPass. You sign up a week or so ahead of time. They randomly pick however many accounts, and those accounts can purchase 1 of the item, for $90. Sounds fair, until you didn’t get an invite and find the item, before it has even shipped to the original buyer, on eBay. Starting at $350.

I’m not sure what else one can do to prevent people from buying all the stock just to resell. In Disneyland, Disney instituted a system to prevent Passholders from reselling Passholder exclusives. To receive those items, and your discount, your pass must be scanned. The system was initially in place to prevent fake passes or discounts being given to non-Passholders. Disney started cross-referencing purchases of Passholders to sales on eBay, and then suspending the persons Annual Pass. It slowed the resales down, but didn’t stop them. We can only assume the system didn’t work well enough because it was never implemented in Disney World.

Another solution would be for Disney to increase their prices to the $350 commanded on eBay. This would be wildly unpopular… and might make the eBay situation worse. Who knows.

My solution is very final. End Limited Edition. The demand for Disney products is too great for numbered runs. You’d probably maximize profits again by generating as much product as is demanded. Collectors will still have collections to collect. There will still be “Minnie Mouse” items that will draw the crowds. Maybe one day we’ll all be responsible and kind enough to allow Limited Edition runs again without attempting to cash in for our own gain, but today isn’t the day.