Bankrupt by Beanie Babies

I was thinking recently about the Beanie Baby craze and then I saw this story about a man who want bankrupt buying Beanie Babies. Pretty much exactly what I pictured happening to someone.

Let me tell you about my experience with Beanie Babies.

When I was 13 I was a candy striper at my local hospital. I wasn't legally old enough to work but I could child labor for free if it was "volunteer work". Is it volunteering if you're forced by your mother?

I worked mostly in the gift shop. It was a pretty sweet deal. Literally. I got to eat any expired or broken cookies. Let's just say that every once in a while a giant cookie accidentally broke.

I usually worked the register or if needed I would sit in the back room and stay on hold to order Beanie Babies. Yes demand was so high I had to hold for an hour to place the order. If you worked the register you were also in charge of the Beanie Baby list. The Beanie Baby list was a wait list of people who could then be allowed to purchase a Beanie Baby. People would line up on the day they came in and I would check their name off the wait list and let them choose their Beanie Baby.

You would have thought I was handing out food in a bread line during the Great Depression. People would freak out because they thought they were first on the list and so and so cut them and they wanted this Beanie Baby but there was only 3 of those and they were 5th on the list! It was pure insanity and I was getting paid ZERO dollars to deal with rabid middle aged moms.

I did have a few Beanie Babies but being right in the middle of Beanie Baby Thunder Dome soured me towards them a bit. I wonder where all these Beanie Babies are now? Probably sitting on yard sale tables and in basements all over the country. I hope we all learned a lesson here. Fads are fads so let's all calm it down.