Is This Any Way to Run a Family?

Hoping to inspire, to teach responsibility and instill determination, Tom Parsons decided to start a business with his 15-year-old son. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Tom Parsons sported a Caribbean-themed Tommy Bahama shirt, a Mickey Mouse cap that identified him as "the Big Cheese," and a girth that hinted at his prosperity.

He was the very picture of leisure, and as he sidled up to the cashier at the Lego Emporium, he looked like all the other visitors to Walt Disney World diverting themselves from the aggravation of long lines and suffocating heat with a moment's haggling. "Would you mind giving me two Disney pins?" he asked.

Parsons inspected the lanyard around the young woman's neck, which was festooned with the likenesses of the Mighty Ducks and the Chipmunks and other colorful characters. Disney instructs its employees--"cast members," they are called--to trade a Disney pin for a Disney pin whenever a customer asks, and one that Parsons couldn't identify caught his eye. "I think it's a C, for Captain Hook," the girl told him.

"Oh, good. I'll take that," he replied. In exchange for this and a striking, rather mysterious pin marked with a big X across its face, Parsons reached into his pocket and pulled out two pins issued for the opening of Euro Disney. "These are from Europe," he said. "They're actually 12 years old."

The Walt Disney Company reaches deeply into the imaginations of young and old alike in countless ways, but one of the company's particularly brilliant--if little-noticed--efforts at marketing is the pin trade. Disney parks and stores mint more than a thousand different models each year and sell them for $6 and up to visitors, who can then exchange them for other pins. Trading with cast members "enhances the guest experience," as company managers like to put it, but the pins have a surprisingly long shelf life, and even a secondary market, in which millions--there are up to 30,000 styles--circulate among collectors and dealers. There are price guides and conventions for pin traders. And on any given day thousands are up for bid on eBay.

In the summer of 2004, these included around a hundred on offer each week from a start-up outfit based in Arlington, Texas, called Parsons & Sons, which also sold various movie-branded watches, dolls and action figures, and sundry other ephemera, the collectibles of our disposable age. Tom Parsons had already made a name for himself--and more than a small fortune--dealing in cheap plane tickets through BestFares.com, the company he founded in 1983. Best Fares took in at least $6 million in revenue last year, according to Parsons, nearly half of which turned into profit paid to its sole owner. Yet here Parsons stood in Downtown Disney, 53 years old and his pockets full of Euro Disney pins. He and his brother John had bought a thousand of them for 80 cents each; they hoped to trade them all in just 24 hours. There was no time for Space Mountain or the Lion King. This was the Fourth of July weekend, but when Tom Parsons brought his family to Orlando, it was a business trip.

"The intent here is to teach him something," Tom Parsons liked to say. "I'm on a mission from hell."

Scouring discounters and liquidators for overlooked bargains may appeal to the same impulses as searching computer reservation systems for unadvertised specials and mistakes, but Parsons's foray into eBay was not strictly for his own amusement. It was as much for his son Bryan, then 15, to show him the value of work and enterprise. "The intent here is to teach him something," Parsons would say. "I'm going to push him and push him. I'm on a mission from hell." Parsons served as an MP in Vietnam, and he is fond of referring to his tasks as missions. He liked to describe eBay as the schooling Bryan was not getting at school.

Bryan's colleagues for a time included his stepbrother Bobby and his cousin David. They did not, however, include his older brother, Michael. Twenty-seven-year-old Michael, who never finished college, bounced from home to home and job to job. The eBay business was intended to keep Bryan off that wayward path, and Parsons even held out hope that once the venture took off, Michael might return to the fold.

On this day in 2004, the Parsons had split up at the gates of the Magic Kingdom, and for hours Tom followed a trail Bryan and Bobby had left on the lanyards of the cast members they met. Now at Downtown Disney, Bryan appeared, a sturdy boy with a mop of blond hair, and together father and son approached a cast member named Sandy at the Disney Tails shop. Tom motioned toward the cashier. "You do yours," he said to Bryan, who requested Davy Crockett and Tinkerbell. Sandy looked over the pins Bryan gave her. Interjected Tom, "They're from, uh, Europe."

And so it went for the rest of that night and much of the next day. Bryan and Bobby had trained themselves to spot limited-edition and other hard-to-find prizes; they wandered among the boutiques, emporiums, kiosks, and carts, bartering 80 cents for, they hoped, three dollars, four dollars, five dollars. By midafternoon, they had divested themselves of all the Euro Disney pins. "This was a lot of fun," Bryan said as we made our way to the exit.

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