Disney Discontinuing Sale of Disney Dollars

That's sad, but I got some Disney Dollars as a souvenir a few years ago at WDW.

 

Awe, though I never bought any I always thought they were a really neat idea. Especially for children.

 

It's amazing how much some of them are worth.

 

This makes me very sad, as I was planning to pick up a nice stack for my kids in 4 weeks. They're finally of an age where they can hold and use some cash. I have some of the original 1987 dollars and a fair number of different releases after that through the early 90's.

 

Can't figure out what the downside for Disney is.

 

They still exist? Who knew? I thought they were long dead and buried.

 

With every register at the parking having to accept them, it adds a significant layer of complexity (potentially) to every till in the park--which means lots of extra labor to open and close every till and process it through Cash Control (or whatever it is now).

Many moons ago, when parking was $6 (and, I believe, later $8), Parking Lot routinely purchased $2 bills to use in making change. Merch and food divisions hated that practice, because those $2 bills got spent all over the park, adding to the complexity of tills.

So I imagine they looked--at least significantly--at that labor cost and decided the profits just weren't there any more. They haven't done significant advertising of DDs in 10 or 15 years, that I can tell, so they went hugely out of fashion.

Another anecdote: when I went through Cash Handling training in 1994, every non-ODV register in the park was authorized to do foreign currency exchanges. We would call Cash Control to confirm the exchange rate / amount, and could do it anywhere in the park. That service has long since been restricted to Guest Service locations (City Hall, hotel front desks, etc.), I imagine partly for the same reason--the complexity could add significantly to cash handling labor costs.

Just my surmising. I'm very sad about this.

 

With so many folk hanging on to them as souvenirs and collector's items; I figured they were a real money maker.
But I can see how they could also be a hassle. I hate anything that makes lines take longer.

 

I'm thinking I should call the local Disney Store and see if they have any for sale.

 

Really? How much complexity could it add?

While Disney Dollars would make money as souvenirs and forcing guests to carry money that the must spend on Disney property, there are also costs involved. Printing the bill may not have cost much, but it was still non-zero. And the money may have been easy to counterfeit. And if it wasn't, anti-counterfeit measures would surely add to the cost of the bills. Seems like more hassle than it was worth.

 

Me too.

I wonder if I still have some stashed away somewhere? I bought some the first year they were released.

 

I'd be willing to bet a nice crispy Disney dollar that this is the reason for cancelling the program.

Heck, governments are having trouble contending with today's sophisticated methods. Though Disney would likely never admit it was a problem, somehow I have the feeling it just might be.

 

A few moments of minutes per CM / till = hundreds of hours in a pay period. Registered do not have space for $2 bills, either, and the rules about how each drawer is loaded are (were, anyway) very strict.

 

When I worked a McJob back in the day we just stuck such bills (along with $50's, $100's, and the occasional traveller's check) under the removable till. Doesn't seem like rocket science.

 

It's not surprising when new releases slowed to almost nothing years ago, very few places 'sold them' and a lot of times they were out.. and no one uses them to a point of non-issue for most people..

 

I'm going to guess it's counterfeiting.

The place I work for holds several events every year. When I first started, we printed physical tickets, and it worked fine. But then color copiers/printers' quality grew by leaps and bounds, and they became easy to counterfeit. Get some good card stock, and you could do it. We discovered the problem the mornings after when examining them carefully - in the rush of collecting them at the events themselves there wasn't time (or great lighting), and some people took advantage of that.

Two or three we could write off. But as it became easier to do, more people did it, and we eventually had to move to a QR code scanning system.

I would guess it would be relatively easy to counterfeit Disney dollars if you wanted to these days, and it's a lot to expect the average hourly cash register CM to catch them. And as Yookeroo points out, adding anti-counterfeit measures would add to the cost of the bills.

On a separate matter, there was a brief period around the Bicentennial when DL cash register cm's were, I'm pretty sure, actually encouraged to give away two-dollar bills as change. I say that because in late '75 and '76 I got more two-dollar bills in change in 2 visits to DL than I probably did in hundreds of other transactions over those 18 months. I noticed it enough that by the end of the '76 visit I actively looked into the cash drawers at both Coke Corner and the Emporium and saw bulging full drawers of 2's - which one never saw anywhere else, because despite the attempt to re-introduce the 2-dollar bill around that time, they never really caught on.

At that age, I thought it was kind of cool to get 2-dollar bills, and it seemed to me that DL was just trying to further the bicentennial vibe, with Jefferson on the front of the bill and America on Parade going down Main Street. I got so many at DL that I could actually spend them later; the first couple I got (gift from my Philly grandparents), I actually didn't want to spend because they seemed rare.

 

Shouldn't be. But of DL is micromanaging you...

But if your parking lot is giving a lot out, you should be prepared to accept them.

 

A few observations:

(a) The more random items you have in a drawer, the more lines you need on your tally sheet, the more categories you need in your system, the more time it takes to count and verify, etc. For each drawer that was stocked with them in the morning, they had to be counted out each day--and kept in stock, etc. Cash Control (or its current name) at Disneyland involves an army of CMs. For each drawer or transaction, the added burden may not appear to be much--but multiplied by the hundreds of registers at the resort, it's definitely a measurable burden. It becomes more of an incremental burden when the transactions are rare. If DDs were used constantly all over the place, but volume would reduce the per-transaction / per-CM / per-drawer version.

(b) DDs haven't been actively promoted for sale in years. Signage appeared at every ticket booth through the 90s, but now is nowhere. Remember the Cashiers at the Starcade and Penny Arcade? They also had signs. Most Guests now likely have never heard of them or had no idea they still existed. The cost to produce and sell them rises significantly on a per-bill basis when no one buys or uses them.

(c) Their quality in recent years have been excellent--and the most popular denominations were always $1s and $5s (indeed, that was all they had in 1987). It is very difficult to make substantial profits from high quality counterfeiting of $1s and $5s when you are doing small transactions. If someone showed up with backpacks full of counterfeits, you can be sure they received intense scrutiny. If some is just trying to place a handful here or there, profits are minimal. Counterfeiters passing bills at places like DL depend on volume.

(c) The #1 CMs were trained to detect counterfeit currency, at least in 1994, was . . . ? Well, I'll let you guess. We were taught many things to look for, but a few things were never done: checking bills with counterfeit detection pens, black lights, etc.; and, if a CM suspected a counterfeit, refusing the bill and returning it to the Guest.

Anyway, I've no idea why the DD program was canceled, and I am sad about it.

 

I doubt that professional counterfeiters would bother with DD and try to make "profit" from them. But the average Joe printing them just to save 20 bucks personally on food and merch... multiplied by however many people might do that... yeah.

Another possible reason for their demise could be the fact that cash itself is far less used than it used to be even 20 years ago. I didn't think to check, but it's possible I paid for nothing with cash on my last trip. Maybe a $10 lunch. Even that I'm not sure - I'd have been just as likely to put it on my card.

In my "regular" (non-vacation) life, I used to get cash from an ATM every Friday like clockwork. If I ran out, I might have to go midweek to top off. Now I go maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks. I just don't pay cash for that many things any more.