The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute (Unabridged)
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s
In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. In just three years, collectors who saw the toys as a means of speculation made creator Ty Warner, an eccentric college dropout, a billionaire—without advertising or big-box distribution. Beanie Babies were ten percent of eBay’s sales in its early days, with an average selling price of $30—six times the retail price. At the peak of the bubble in 1999, Warner reported a personal income of $662 million—more than Hasbro and Mattel combined.
The end of the craze was swift and devastating, with “rare” Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they’d once been deemed priceless.
Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews (including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the strangest speculative mania of all time.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Wow, this is a ride. Business journalist Zac Bissonnette’s account of the ’90s mania for Beanie Babies is utterly fascinating. Because the manufacturer regularly retired individual characters, adult collectors became convinced the value of the kids’ plushies would skyrocket. On the then-new internet marketplace eBay, the $5 toys regularly sold for three and four figures. Bissonnette interviews people who got rich and people whose lives were ruined—including one man who committed a Beanie-inspired murder—but it’s company founder Ty Warner who proves to be the story’s real villain. He’s an emotionally abusive, plastic-surgery-obsessed self-promoter whose misguided decisions single-handedly topple his own empire. Narrator P.J. Ochlan’s newscaster cadence gives the story an immediacy that makes this audiobook fly by. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble is a once-in-a-lifetime story, brilliantly told.
