[quote name='ZombieToast']Psht, shame is for the weak. Beanie Babies were amazing flips back in the day. My mom and I made a few thousand dollars on Erin and Diana alone. I've still got a trunk full of 99% of the Beanie Babies made before the crash when Ty retired everything and then flooded the market. There are only a few that I still care about, so I wish I would've sold most of them when they were still valuable, but it doesn't matter. With all of the money we made, every single one of those were free.
Disney beanies were hot for a little while too. As I sure I've probably said at some point on CAG, we once got a group together to stand in line two or three times outside of the Disney Store (I think in Thousand Oaks) because they were selling "signed" Merlin beanies. Basically, a guy dressed as Merlin would stamp a logo/signature onto the tag of a beanie and then you'd pay for it at the register. They only allowed one per customer and they were only available that day, so like I said, we went a couple of times. We spent hours there, but we ended up with a ton of them and with just one sale, we made enough money to pay for all of the beanies plus a profit. 'Twas a good day.
I also had some luck with
Meanies, but they were a lot harder to come by because many stores didn't want to sell them. We lucked out with
Puffkins because we started buying them long before they became popular, but that only lasted for a little while; people basically only collected them when they couldn't get Beanie Babies. Sadly, we didn't have any luck with
Bamm Beanos. Because of the popularity of bears, we thought it would be smart to become official retailers (the waiting list for Beanie Babies was nearly endless), but people never took interest in them. I guess it's not so appealing when
all of them are bears. Oh well...it was a small drop in the bucket compared to our success with other beanies.[/QUOTE]
I still have a ton of beanies, and I still collect them somewhat, I enjoy getting the new turkey every thanksgiving and basically ones that I can put out during the holidays and use as decorations. I didn't do bad with them back in the day but I was like 12 and didn't have access to a computer or eBay but I sold what I didn't want years later for probably what I paid for them or more. I did have a couple good sales back in the day using the paper though. Overall it wasn't bad since I actually like the beanies and I wasn't doing it purely for profit, I didn't buy hundreds of them or anything like that.
The beanie fad was much more intense than any other fad I participated in, (except for maybe cabbage patch dolls or pound puppies in the 80s)!in recent years, pokemon, tamagotchi, webkinz, skylanders, you name it but beanies topped the list for demand by far. There were people lining up outside of shops for them almost every day. I can personally verify that the demand for pound puppies especially the newborns was hotter than fire but I still think the demand for beanies may have been more intense just because the fad lasted for longer I feel.