The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette. Visit his author page on Amazon at Zac Bissonnette.
I’ve posted about the work of Zac Bissonnette before when I wrote a review of his book Debt-Free U, about the utter foolishness of piling up thousands of dollars in debt in order to go to a prestigious university. Cuh-rae-zee! While I can’t claim any particular plan of ours in this regard, it is so great for us to know that our son Gideon has his degree from a good school and has no debt. And now he’s headed for grad school and they’ll pay him. We are thrilled!
Anyway, I took a look at Laura Vanderkam’s recent post about books to read and she mentioned this latest Zac book. I’ve only gotten a little ways into it but wanted to go ahead and post about it since it’s so great. Remember Beanie Babies? We knew some people who paid $150 for a special edition of some baby or other (I think it had to do with Princess Di). It was hard to keep a straight face while they were earnestly explaining how the beads in this BB were of a superior quality over those, like, regular old BB’s. Zac (may I call him that?) says that a whole little industry sprang up of protective covers/containers you could buy to protect the labels (which you were supposed to take off before giving the toy–remember, these were toys–to a child–remember, toys are for children) or the entire thing.
Why should you read this book even if you’ve never heard of Beanie Babies? Because it’s such a treatise on human nature. The BB craze is just one in a series of speculative bubbles caused by our desire to be in on something. If you’re student of history you’ve probably heard of the Great Tulip Bulb Bubble in Holland in the 1600’s. People were putting their life savings into these things, prices were rising higher and higher . . . and then the bubble burst. Actually, the BB bubble (or BBB for short) took place around the same time as the dot.com bubble. We go through periodic housing bubbles, of course, but at least houses are things with real value. If your house is suddenly worth less than you paid for it, you still have a place to live–assuming you can still afford to make the payments. But a bin full of plush toys stuffed with beads, each one lovingly protected in lucite? Well, you can’t eat them, or drink them, and if no one will pay you for them, you’re sunk. Just toss them in with the Confederate money!
So read this book and ask yourself if you’re getting pulled into buying anything that’s labeled a “collectible.” If so, you need to get out while the gettin’s good. And by the way–you should also subscribe to Laura Vanderkam’s blog. I mention her periodically. Her posts are always short, and she tells about what she’s doing with her time as a busy mom of four with a successful career as a writer and speaker. She’s a good nudge for me, as she manages to cram in an incredible number of activities but never seems particularly stressed about it. She has a wonderfully helpful husband and a regular babysitter, so she’s not out there struggling as a single mom or anything like that. But still! Go to her website to read recent posts and sign up to get her newsletter.
Yes, remember the craziness about Cabbage Patch dolls? We didn’t stand in line for them or anything back then, but I now have two of them in very good condition that belonged to my daughters and cannot sell them.