Ah, Beanie Babies. Back in their heyday, my little sister took to collecting them with disturbing zeal. Suddenly, there was commercial interest not just from her Nerds Rope-addled matrix of grade school associates, but from adult neighbors with disposable cash and a house flipping gene. There were times I’d enter her room just to observe their impeccably organized assemblage…I stared at them and they stared back. Of course, those were the times my sister would rush in with three new strains of the Beans w/accompanying poems, always glaring at me lest I dared to condescend. How could I? I used to collect the remnants of paper hole punches–I preferred to call it confetti–in an old lunch bag. I used to collect dried lily pads of Elmer’s glue that could double as press-on nails. My kind of OCD might not have transposed so seamlessly into the acquisition and hoarding of attractive merchandise, but I swear I wasn’t judging. It just always fascinated me to hear stories of how far possessed consumers would go to obtain a “Ty” tag or twenty.
For instance:
- At an Illinois guns-for-Beanie Babies exchange, police gave away every last Beanie and collected 40 guns.
- People were smuggling foreign Beanies into the country at such an alarming rate that Ty had to issue an embargo:
- “A consumer is allowed to have one Beanie Baby for personal use every 30 days,” said Customs officer Ralph Hackney. To enforce the rule, the Customs people are forced regularly to go through the packing of children, parents and grandparents in search of the furry creatures. One inspection yielded a haul of 15,000 Beanies.
- A U.S. trade rep was found in violation of the decree
- A man getting a divorce files a motion to get his fair share of Beanies:
- “It’s ridiculous and embarrassing,” said Frances Mountain, moments before squatting on the courtroom floor alongside her ex-husband to choose first from a pile of dozens of stuffed toys. Maple the Bear was the first to go, as a few people in the gallery snickered.
Of course, this is just a sample…Please do share any venal Beanie stories.
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I worked in a Hallmark store during the height of Beanie Baby hell. There were three shops in our shopping center that sold the little demons. All three shops put a limit on how many of each a customer could buy.
One customer, nicknamed the Beanie Nazi by the retailers, was so upset by the new rule that he spit on one of my co-workers on his way out, calling her a fat whore. Class act, can’t you tell? A few days later, he was denied at one of the other stores and – I kid you not – he went out into the parking lot and slashed the tires on one of the employee’s car. Seriously! The shopping center management called in the city police and the guy was slapped with a restraining order and was not allowed to set foot in the shopping center or the parking lots again.
posted by Jessie on 5-31-2007 at 10:41 pm
I worked at a store where while I was the lone employee working some men came in and asked for beanies. I explained that we had some and they would be out in the afternoon when i had more help to deal with the rush. One of the men came back in and bought some other stuff. When I went in the storeroom later I realizd that the box of a few hundred swan beanies had been lifted from the broken-in to storeroom. Grown men planned a heist to steal not the safe, or my purse, or telescopes or any other high-priced merchandise, but a box of stuffed swans.
posted by Liz on 6-1-2007 at 5:14 am
Haha. I use to LOVE beanie babies.
Every week i would walk down to the corner pharmacy and buy one or two of the new beanies. I was seriously addicted to those things. I owned pretty much every Beanie Baby made up until the time my parents decided i was a little too obsessed. My mother took away ALLLL my beanie babies and stored them in the basement. One fact about my basement, every time we get excess amounts of rain [which is like twice a year on average]our whole basement is flood city. I was literally on the floor crying when i found my mildewed babies. I still haven’t quite forgiven my mom for that one.
posted by Jeannie on 6-1-2007 at 7:06 am
I used to collect Beanie Babies, and there was this awesome shopping mall in the area with three Hallmark stores. But then all of a sudden one day they put a limit on how many each person could buy. BOY, was I mad. I did some things I’m not very proud of, I’ll tell you that!
I don’t go there anymore.
posted by BBN on 6-1-2007 at 7:17 am
I worked/ran in a fast food joint (mc crappers), during one of the mini beanie baby promotions.
One day we had one lady come through and order 50 (count them fifty) hap.. err kids-meals, hold the food. This was due to the fact that with the demand we could not sell that toy independent of the meal (which is usually possible). This specific lady had entered the store earlier and attempted to purchase every one of the in-demand item outright.
Our only option was to give her the food, she paid for it, therefore, she received it. When she learned she would have a large supply of hamburgers and fries (with drinks), she opted to drive off and try one of the other similarly named stores (who we called immediately).
posted by Thaylok on 6-1-2007 at 7:24 am
I had a pretty decent collection at one point. My mom used to work in a small gift store that carried them before the craze, so I had some of the very early ones. A few years later in the high of the insanity, I (in my mid teens by this point) sold quite a few of them for a tidy profit. My biggest sale actually was the complete set of the McDonald’s toys. My mom, working at this time in another small gift store, trafficked in the rarer ones, at one point selling “Erin Bear” for something like $700!
posted by Sara on 6-1-2007 at 10:15 am
I sympathize with Thaylok, i worked for a woman who loved the mini babies from McDonalds, so every week we would drive to the restaurant and order 20 happy meals, i think me and the other 2 employees gain about 10 pounds from the food which my boss refused to throw away
posted by loaf on 6-1-2007 at 1:15 pm
Yeah, I was another one who worked retail in the malls. Like so many others, our store had a window instead of a wall that displayed to the walkway. Our brilliant manager naturally thought that would be a good place to put our shipment of BBs. Yeah, great idea, until you saw the crowd of customers gathered inside the store start shoving to get their prize. One of them almost went through that plate-glass window before we called security and relocated the things.
posted by Larissa on 6-1-2007 at 4:46 pm
I was at Yankee Stadium on a Beenie Baby givaway day with my son in ’98. Forget the stupid toy, we saw David Wells pitch a perfect game!
Funny how a stuffed doll is now associated with history.
posted by Joe P on 6-2-2007 at 9:10 am
Being an only child with few friends, I would line mine up and have meetings. It wasn’t school, just meetings. My damn secretary whatever animal it was did a terrible job.
I was a strange sad kid.
posted by anon. on 6-2-2007 at 11:09 am
Hey, BBN, have you by any chance ever met Jessie? Just wondering.
posted by Pointy-Hatted Geek on 6-3-2007 at 1:45 pm
Joe P, I was there for David Wells’ perfect game too! My mom put that beanie baby in a case along with the ticket stub right away… Couldn’t tell ya now, but at one point that thing was worth almost a thousand dollars!
posted by Kat on 6-4-2007 at 6:14 am
my aunt had every single beanie bear- even the Princess Diana bear. she actually had two Diana bears- she found out that the first one was a fake, and tracked a real one down on ebay. it cost hundreds of dollars.
i used to live with this aunt- and the beanies were lined up on every tier to our book shelves. she must have dumped thousands of dollars on those things- and they serve no purpose what so ever.
god, people are weird.
posted by Em on 7-21-2008 at 6:30 am
omg my mother used to be in love with beanie babies! she thought we liked them, little did she know she had been the one addicted to them for so long. I mean we had every single one, when we auctioned them off she made quite a profit off of a little bag full of beans. Strange how society works sometimes
posted by Alexandra on 7-21-2008 at 8:52 am
I also had the obsession with spending $$ at least once a week on Beanies. My dad built me a shelf along the long wall of my room to store them all. I don’t know where they are now… my family moved while I was in college and I haven’t seen then since. I assume they’re worth nothing these days?
posted by Kelly J on 7-21-2008 at 10:22 am
Oh how I remember trying to talk my mother out of investing in Beanie Babies. It was near the end of the craze and interest had already started to wane. She called me with this brilliant idea because she had just stumbled upon this “new” investment idea.
Thankfully, she got distracted and didn’t invest her life savings, but every few months or so I hear about the latest “can’t fail” investment. I think the last thing she came up with was lighthouses and how EVERYONE was going to be into lighthouses soon. Ugh!
posted by Karen on 7-21-2008 at 10:41 am
I still have all of mine…some of the tags included. It’s fun to go through them and remember how crazy we all were about them. They’re in storage above my garage now, I think.
Man, I wish they were still worth something, because I would totally sell them. Oh well!
posted by Michelle on 7-21-2008 at 1:29 pm
Being kind of oblivious to trends in pop culture I did not realize the cute stuffed frog I had bought for my baby to chew on while teething was an oh so collectible Beanie Baby. First thing I did when I bought it was cut off the tag (gasp) and then I gave it to my child to gnaw and drool on and washed every few days in with the rest of the laundry. My sister is more suburban and in touch with trends than I am and she almost fainted when she saw what I was letting me kid teethe on. Evidently the frog was one of the “Original Nine” Beanies and would be worth a gajillion dollars if I had left the tags on it. I still have that worn out, plush chewed off frog tucked away in a memento box.
My son and I continue this trend but taking toys out of boxes and playing with them.
posted by Cynthia on 7-22-2008 at 12:50 am