Sorry, No one wants your Beanies!
CHICAGO – WSJ – Cameron Percy thought he’d found a
rare treasure when he moved into a new place two weeks ago. Someone had
left behind dozens of Beanie Babies in a box in the basement.
The
28-year-old took to eBay , Reddit and Instagram, and concluded the small
stuffed animals, a craze from the 1990s, will one day soar in value,
like the bitcoins he bought in early January.
“A
lot of them are never going to come back, and so they’re definitely
going to become valuable,” said Mr. Percy. His online listings include
Slowpoke, a sloth, and Teddy, a holiday bear.
Not. So. Fast.
Two
decades after the great Beanie Baby boom, where old and young hit
Hallmark Stores around the country in search of rare examples, the
speculators are back, living in an alternate Beanie reality.
Some
on eBay insist that their rare Beanies, with mistakes in the tags, from
a specific generation or with PVC beads as their fillings instead of
the more common polyethylene, are worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Such
dreams are crushed for anyone calling Rogue Toys, a collectibles store
with branches in Las Vegas and Portland, Ore. The store’s answering
machine specifically says the store doesn’t want to buy your Beanies.
“If
you bring Beanies to me and try to sell them to me in bulk, I’ll give
you about 20 cents. That’s me telling you I don’t want them,” said Steve
Johnston, the store’s owner. “Give them away.”
Many hoped that
the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death last summer would inspire
interest in her memorial bear. Others have seen viral news stories
touting the return of the market. Some, mostly retirees looking to
downsize, thought that now the time might finally be ripe.
Mr. Percy has managed to sell only one Beanie after posting 11 listings.
“It is not like they are selling fast,” he said.
The
recent wave of Beanie optimism, toy appraisers say, has been fueled by
viral stories online. Ryan Tedards, who runs Love My Beanies, a Beanie
Babies price guide website, says many prospective sellers cite articles
or videos claiming certain beanies are worth large amounts of money.
“There’s
just this cycle of fake news about Beanie Babies, some of them are the
same article, copied and pasted, but they get a ton of traffic,” said
Mr. Tedards, who fields about a hundred questions a week from people
asking what their Beanies are worth. “It is always a bit of a battle. I
have to explain to them that what they read or saw is not true.”
These flurry of posts have confused some collectors, filling them with hope and then letting them down.
Among
the disappointed is Lynn Bowman, who started collecting Beanies in 1994
with her then 6-year-old son. She would travel across Illinois and eat
McDonald’s burgers to collect the “Teenie Beanies,” toys that could only
be purchased with a meal, in the hopes that they would one day be worth
thousands.
Now, her old hobby has turned into a bit of a
nightmare. No one wants them, not even the five bears she packaged with
(fresh) candy that she tried to sell for just $20 in time for
Valentine’s Day.
“I kept them really well, and now I find they
aren’t worth very much,” she said, having spent recent weeks researching
and sorting the Beanies, kept pristine in three tubs in her attic.
“I’ll probably end up selling them for cheap—it is really sad.”
Gary
Larson, a 65-year-old retiree, remembers the “casual excitement” he felt
seeing articles claiming a Mystic, a white unicorn, or a Clubbie, made
to commemorate the Beanie Baby club, could be worth thousands.
“But
then I’d take out my box of Beanies and realize they were just the
normal, ordinary ones, not the ones people were saying are rare,” he
said. He is having difficulty selling any of his roughly 200 Beanies for
even $2 each, and has given some away.
It wasn’t supposed to be
this way. A 1997 price guide, self-published by a New Jersey father,
predicted some Beanies, made by Chicago-based toy company Ty Inc., would
appreciate 8,000% within the following decade.
The prediction
didn’t even hold up for a year. A 1998 Wall Street Journal article found
that the “American Trio” of Beanies—Lefty the donkey, Righty the
elephant and Libearty the white bear—had fallen to $899 at one Florida
shop from $1,299 earlier that year. Ty didn’t respond to a request for
comment.
Today, that same trio would probably be worth about $50,
says antiques and rare toys appraiser Bruce Zalkin. He remembers a
half-a-million dollar deal he made in the mid-1990s for 28,000 bears,
which would be worth “hardly any money today.”
Part of the
problem, Mr. Zalkin says, is that Beanies were made to be collected,
driving up hype and saturating the market. By contrast, children
actually played with tin toys from the 1920s or plastic “Star Wars”
toys, making pristine examples rare. Toy appraisers predict Beanies will
never make a comeback, since the 1990s children—millennials—aren’t
collecting like generations before them.
“Sometimes these things
that sound like a great idea just don’t pan out,” said Mr. Larson, who
remembers going to a 1997 Chicago Cubs game to get his hands on a
commemorative Cubs bear even though he is a die-hard White Sox fan. “I
definitely fell for it.”