“The End Is Coming! The End Is Coming!”
Woman at a Toy Counter, c. 1880. [The J. Paul Getty Museum]
If you were a child during the late 1990s, there’s a good chance you either owned Beanie Babies or your parents went crazy over them. Beanies featured simple designs that inspired complex madness. A mixture of polyester, synthetic plush, and plastic pellets, Beanies were ordinary-looking children’s playthings that took the world by storm. Throughout the mid- to late 1990s, they became ubiquitous in American homes and fostered a community. By the end of the decade, the craze went haywire. In April 1998, a police department near Chicago removed weapons from the streets by offering a buyback program where people could exchange their guns for Beanie Babies. A few months later, in a foreshadowing of the inanity of contemporary politics, U.S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky sparked controversy when Customs forced her to turn over a few dozen Beanie Babies she purchased while traveling to China with President Bill Clinton. “Instead of trying to reduce our $50 billion trade deficit with China,” stated Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson, “our trade representative was scouring the street markets of Beijing grabbing up every illegal, black market ‘Beanie Baby’ she could get her hands on.” Citing “a source close to the White House delegation,” the Washington Post reported that Barshefsky turned over 40 Chinese Beanies.
Beanie Babies came with a red heart-shaped tag with the word “Ty” printed in large white letters. Ty is an homage to Ty Warner, who created the Beanies in 1993. His company Ty Inc. grew from a modest upstart near Chicago with a handful of employees to running a 370,000-square-foot warehouse and generating $1.4 billion in sales by 1998.
Looking at a Beanie Baby would give the impression that they were children’s toys. But what drove the revenue of Ty Inc. wasn’t parents buying toys for their children to play with. It was adults buying Beanies for themselves and treating them like financial instruments. The CD-ROM Ultimate Collector for Beanie Babies made a splash at the video game industry’s largest trade event in 1999. For $25, consumers received software helping them organize their collection and track price changes. Ultimate Collector featured tax summaries and insurance reports. “It was no longer a child’s toy,” said one collector when recalling why she accumulated Beanies throughout the late ’90s. “It was the hunt for me.”
Despite selling millions of stuffed animals, the Ty company convinced consumers that Beanies were in short supply. In the late ’90s, every few months a particular Beanie Baby would be “retired,” which drove prices up. Online Beanie reselling became so common that when eBay filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to become a publicly traded company in 1998, it cited the volatility of Beanie Baby sales as a risk factor to the company’s financial health. During the second fiscal quarter in 1998, eBay had “over 30,000 simultaneous auctions listed in its ‘Beanie Babies’ category,” the company stated. “A decline in the popularity of, or demand for, certain collectibles or other items sold through the eBay service could reduce the overall volume of transactions on the eBay service, resulting in reduced revenues. In addition, certain consumer ‘fads’ may temporarily inflate the volume of certain types of items listed on the eBay service, placing a significant strain upon the Company’s infrastructure and transaction capacity.” eBay was correct to be cautious about a fad. Beanie sales accounted for a tenth of its total revenues, but the gravy train would not last.
There was enough interest in this market that Beanie Baby price guides were produced to forecast Beanie resale values the same way investment banking analysts make stock predictions. At its peak, there were more than a hundred Beanie Baby price guides. Price guides were often published by collectors who had large investments in Beanie Babies. Unlike an impartial observer, it was in the collector’s personal interest to hype prices rather than proceeding with caution. At the time that Beanies were reselling for thousands of dollars, one price guide predicted they would appreciate another 8,000% over the following decade. Enough people acted on price guide recommendations that, for a brief time, their outrageous predictions became self-fulling until the bubble popped.
Retiring Beanies initially drove up resales. Then Ty Inc. tried a more aggressive tactic. “For years, nothing has been hotter than those cuddly little animals with cute little names,” stated CBS Evening News correspondent Anthony Mason during a September 1999 segment. “But abruptly this week, the makers of Beanie Babies, Ty Incorporated, announced over the internet that it was over … By the turn of the century, Beanie Babies will become has beans.” The ushering in of the new millennium would include Y2K and Beanie Baby production stoppages. Beanie Baby web forums were full of apocalyptic posts with titles like “The End Is Coming! The End Is Coming!”
Prices did not rise as Ty hoped. More people came to the realization that stuffed animals that originally sold for $5 should not be reselling for $5,000. That people who banked their life savings on children’s collectibles were playing a fool’s game. That there was no value in investing in a mass-produced product whose entire worth is premised on speculation. Beanie collectors were enamored with old toys that sold for high prices. But when old toys become valuable it is because most toys get beat up when children play with them, so finding a toy in mint condition 30 years after it came out is a rarity that drives prices up.
Beanies were collected by thousands of adults and stored in glass cases. They were produced in such high volume that the supply outstripped the demand. Finding an old mint-condition Beanie Baby is about as rare as finding a pothole on a city street.
People who spent thousands of dollars chasing the Beanie fad had closets full of merchandise that was worth less than its original retail price. A soap opera actor who spent $100,000 on Beanies as an investment in his children’s college education saw his investment evaporate. That might sound laughable, but the actor’s son made a haunting documentary about the saga that displayed the humanity driving the craze and its unfortunate consequences. Collectors were left with credit card debt they couldn’t pay off and regret they couldn’t shake.
By 2004, Ty Warner claimed a loss of nearly $40 million on his tax return. In 2014, Warner was convicted of tax evasion. (Warner loathed all taxes, including road tolls. According to Zac Bissonnette, Warner instructed people he was riding with to “just throw pennies and keep driving! It’s an illegal tax!”) Like so many other rich men found guilty of serious crimes, he avoided jail time and remains wealthy.
Excerpt adapted from 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, available for preorder from University Press of Kansas. Copyright © 2025 by Ross Benes.
