Odd Lots - Revisiting The Strange Story Behind the Beanie Babies Bubble

Episode Date: September 25, 2017

To wrap up our series on financial bubbles, the Odd Lots podcast looks back at an early episode, focusing on one of the most iconic bubbles of the 20th century: Beanie Babies.Two market bubbles stand out from the late 1990s. Technology stocks that were supposed to make everyone a zillionaire. The other: A series of mass-produced stuffed animals priced at $5 each. Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway speak with Zac Bissonnette, author of "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute," to figure out exactly what made millions of people believe that these plush cuties were destined to soar in value. We dive into the psychology behind one of the weirdest speculative manias of all time and draw a connection with the dotcom bubble.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Joe, I'm really sad to say we are coming to the end of our bubble series. I thought you were going to say we're coming to the end of the podcast overall. So I'm actually kind of relieved that we're, but I am sad to, I think I said it last time, like, bubbles are just the best. And I love talking about them. We'll probably talk about them again on, you know, future episodes. But for now, we are, we're wrapping up. All right. So as we wrap up and as you look over a bunch of the different bubbles that we've just been learning about, what stands out for you? Like, what are the lessons that you're actually taking away? Human psychology is just so consistent.

I think it was the first one. We talked with Scott Nations about various booms and busts throughout U.S. stock market history, there's always the great story that goes with them. And so at the kernel of every bubble that we talked about, there's some root of truth to it. It's not a complete fabrication. Something at some point made some sense. And then, of course, humans being the animals that we are, we just can't put things in perspective and we extrapolate way too far. Yeah, that's something that's going to stick with me as well. There's always a certain narrative to explain what's happening. The other thing I was thinking about is almost every bubble that we've spoken about comes or spurs a sort of cottage industry around it.

Like crazy things like, you know, the guys that used to stand outside in Florida trying to hawk real estate during the land bubble. Binder Boys, that's it. Or the baseball card bubble, all the new sets of baseball cards that came in. Yeah, that's specifically the way. supply expands when people are in a mania for X, whatever it is, whether it's land, whether it's baseball cards, whether it's some sort of equity or whatever, the industry will find a way to create supply. The supply never just stays fixed. And of course, you know, we talked about the Florida real estate. So, you know, people had just bought marshland in the middle of nowhere

when all the prime real estate, like around Miami, was sold up. So they always find a way. way to sell something new. People don't just sort of say, oh, they bought it all and now prices will go up. The supply eventually swamps demand. The one thing I'm a little bit sad that we didn't learn more about is the catalyst for the bubbles actually bursting. Because if we knew that, if we knew that, Joe, we could make so much money. We could all be rich. You just see a bubble and just ride it until the day before. Yeah. All right. Well, as it is, we have to stick with a podcast, various other things. But to celebrate the end of our bubble series, we are going to share with our listeners a rerun of one of our most favorite bubbles ever. That's right. So obviously, as we're saying,

we're probably going to keep doing more episodes in the future about bubbles from time to time. And of course, we did some even before we started the original series. And there was one in particular that really stood out that just like totally fits, doesn't it? Yeah. This was one of our earliest ever episodes and it was so much fun. It was one on the Beanie Baby Bubble. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with it in the 1990s, Beanie's, these small stuffed animal toys became a huge cultural phenomenon. And with that phenomenon came a lot of speculation, a lot of trading that came with it. Right. And, you know, they're just stuffed animals. But there was this, a lot of the themes that we discussed in this episode, we discussed with other bubbles on later episode. So the supply thing that

we just mentioned at one point, you know, the idea was that once a line of these stuffed animals was made, there would never be another one, but the supply expanded massively. Last week, remember, we talked about the role that the Beckett magazine had and baseball cards, the sort of first pricing guide. The price guide, sure. Beanie Babies, as we discussed on that episode, also had their price guide. Very similar idea, very similar phenomenon at work. As soon as people could see visually that prices were changing every month or every week, that made people even more inclined them to see them as speculative vehicles. Yeah. And of course, in the same way that you were a young boy trading baseball cards. I was a young girl trading beanie babies. Yeah, it was the same time.

Traditional gender roles here, Joe. Exactly. All right. So this episode, let's see, it aired. It was November 2015. Wow. Almost two years ago. That's crazy.

All right. So this is the Beanie Baby Bubble from November 2015. We interviewed Zach Bissonette. He's a prolific author, and he wrote a fantastic book on this exact topic. Take a listen. Joe, I've got a question for you. What were you doing to make money in 1999? The summer of 1999 was the best summer because I think I made about $2,000 from just a summer job that I had.

But then I put that all into stocks because it was the internet bubble. And I basically paid for two years of college thanks to essentially what I did that summer. That's amazing. It was a good time. Well, I was making money too a little differently. I was still in middle school. I was going to garage sales and selling old toys. And one of the things I sold was a tie-died Beanie Baby lizard.

How much did you sell it for? I sold it for $200 to a 40-year-old man. And at the time, me as an 11-year-old, I thought this was amazing money and I was rolling in it. That is amazing money, objectively for any age, selling a stuffed animal for $200. Right. So why are we talking about this? Today, we're going to delve into what can drive seemingly rational people to spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on stuffed animals. We're going to talk about the Beanie Baby

Bubble. And we're going to talk about something more than that. We're going to talk about bubbles in general, the Internet bubble, and the psychology behind speculative mania. So here with us today is Zach Bisonette. He's the author of the Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Mass Delusion, and the Dark Side of Cute. It's a book that came out earlier this year, and I just happened to finish it this morning. Zach, thanks for joining us. So why? Why did you write a book about Beanie Babies and stuffed animals? Like you, I was in middle school when the Beanie Bury's hit, and I was kind of a nerd,

and I was into like old books and antiques and that kind of thing. And every weekend I would go to this flea market on Cape Cod with my mother. And we had never heard of Beanie Babies. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, that flea market was like 80% Beanie Baby dealers. And they were wearing like fanny packs and visors and talking just really, really excitedly about how much they were going up in value and how this one they'd just paid five. for was now worth 40 and they're not going to sell it this week because next week it'll be worth 50 and that was like that for about two years and then all of a sudden it was gone and no one

ever talked about it again. I just want to say during those same years that my mother was dating a guy who was an antique dealer and so I also went to a lot of flea markets in New England and I actually saw all the exact same thing where suddenly there were these flea markets where that used to be people bringing out their old stuff from their barn. and then it was just people had stuffed animals. Oh, and the traditionalist antique dealers hated it. Yeah. There was one guy I talked to who he was so proud of this.

He was a traditionalist antique dealer who had just railed against Beanie Babies. He would go on CNN. I'm not even kidding. CNN would have these like debates between this guy who they called the Beanie Meanie and the Beanie Baby experts who were making millions of dollars selling, one of them sold a million copies a month of a Beanie Baby magazine that she was publishing. And they would have these debates. And this traditionalist antique dealer was given a group of antique dealers in Indiana gave him a crucified skunk beanie baby with a certificate thanking him for being a traditionalist who stood up for traditional antiques.

So this is the amazing thing. Walk us through how the Beanie Baby bubble came into existence and how we at one day actually got to the point where people were debating the value of stuffed animals on CNN. So it starts out with this very sort of excessive. centric toy maker named Ty Warner, who dropped out of Kalamazoo College, tried to become an actor, failed at that, then became a toy salesman, was wildly successful at that, but then he got fired from that and decided to start his own stuffed animal company. And he started to create these Beanie Babies initially because he thought at a $5 price point, they would be irresistible and that it would help him as sort of a foot in the door with large accounts and that he would then be able to

kind of upsell bigger stores on selling his larger stuffed animal line. And it didn't work at all. I remember talking to, talking to the sales reps for Ty, who remember just there was no interest in these bean babies. People worried they were cheap. They thought they looked cheap. They worried people would buy the beanie babies instead of a more expensive product. It was just not getting any interest in them. But Ty Warner, the guy created them, really, really believed in this product. And he combined that belief with an extremely sort of eccentric, obsessive approach to the product. And the people who had worked with him, which at the beginning was just his girlfriend, but she remember when I talked with her, he would keep her up until like

four in the morning debating what color of the ribbon on a bear should be. And then she'd think they would finally be done debating the color. And he would say, well, what if it was tied this way instead of the other way? And then they would have to go back through the iterations of different colors again for hours. So we had this really, really obsessive approach to the product. This is how the retirement came into being, right? Precisely. And so, so. Sometimes he would come out with a product, and then a few months after he chipped a few thousand of them, he would like wake up in the middle of the night, basically, and decide that it should be a different color. So, like, one of his first Beanie Baby is not one of the very first, but one of the first was Peanut the Elephant, who was originally a royal blue color. And then after a few months of that, I think he chipped, I think like 1400.

I can't remember that, 1,400 or so of this Beanie Baby. and he decided it shouldn't be royal blue, it should be baby blue. And so the fact that they would get retired and never made again, there were never more than that, that's how they became collectible that people would see as going up in value? Entirely accidentally. Because this is happening before anyone cares about these. His annual sales are like $4 million a year at this point,

mostly not from Beanie babies. No one cares about Beanie babies. Then all of a sudden, this small group of people in suburban Chicago who lived on one cul-de-sac, started collecting beanie babies. They saw them in stores because they were near where Ty was headquartered so that he had a big presence in stores there. And they decided they liked these beanie babies

and that they wanted to assemble complete collections for their kids. And they became very obsessive. These were soccer moms. They came very obsessive with trying to assemble complete collections. And so they would call stores in other towns to ask them what beanie babies they had. And then they remembered this, these sort of very strange conversation. They would realize that there would be like these weird variations. and these were the ones that he had retired

or just changed the designer because he would trip a few thousand and then change it entirely accidentally and they started paying each other more for these kind of beanie babies and it's kind of started this small market for them just in this town as this started to happen

as this kind of starts in this small town this woman Peggy Gallagher and her sister Dr. Paula Brinko who was a doctor had this idea you know we're just calling stores like in the Chicago area where this all started, but if we call stores in like other states, we'll be able to find

beanie babies that are really rare that no one else has. So they go to start going local chambers of commerce and getting lists of all of the gift shops. The woman who's a doctor is at the same time that she's doing this, she's doing this study on women who were like diabetic or something, where she had to call hospitals to talk to their researchers. And after she called the researcher, she would ask to be transferred to the gift shop to ask about beanie babies so she could try to order the rare one. But this is the part of the story that I love because we eventually go from this small group of soccer mom collectors who professionalize themselves as beanie baby dealers and Beanie Baby market experts. I mean, one of them had a Beanie World magazine.

She was a self-described Chicago suburban soccer mom. She had a magazine with the circulation of more than one million. Million a month. And more ads per copy than glamour. These were like thick magazines full of ads. So people start seeing the priceless for these beanies and they all figure prices are going to go up forever. These are good investments. Right. Well, right.

And the stores that are hearing all of a sudden out of nowhere start getting calls from these out-of-state collectors are like, oh my gosh, beanie babies are really hot. It starts out as like two people. Did the magazine that published the prices? Because I remember I used to collect baseball cards when I was a kid and there was the Beckett magazine. And there was a crucial avenue by which the baseball card bubble, which also burst. You know, everyone checked the prices each month. So did the magazine for Beanie Babies serve a similar purpose? Hugely so.

So there's a reflexivity, I think, to price guides where they impact prices as much as they report on them. And the first price list, which referred to this lady, Peggy Gallagher, which she started to circulate. She put an ad in, like, a magazine for other collectors saying you sent her self-addressed stamped envelope. She would send you this checklist. And she was like, well, what should I do with her prices? She just made them up, basically. She told me this, that she said, this one's rare, so that one should be worth $20. These were not really based on anything.

And then she kind of sat back and watched on like the AOL message boards. Is these priceless she was making up kind of became the price. And so talk about that how the internet, and those are the early days of the internet helped stoke that bubble. So this is a, Beanie babies were 10% of eBay sales in the early days of eBay's. eBay disclosed in the risk factors to its SEC filings, a dependence on the contingent. That's crazy fact. I love this fact. Yes.

And so people were getting computers, and Beanie Babies, more than anything, really gave people a reason to go on eBay and to do online trading. And actually, just e-commerce in general, not just. There was also traded on a message boards. In the early days of e-commerce, there were a lot of stories that it was not growing as quickly as people thought it would. People weren't comfortable with it. Stuff was too expensive to ship.

With Beanie Baby, something that had a kind of. kind of weird, you weren't sure exactly what they were worth. They were easy to ship and they were really hard to find locally. It brought people on to e-commerce in a way that other more mundane products like Pets.com were not able to. So even though it was a completely pointless bubble of ultimately worthless stuffed animals, it actually did help. It had a beneficial effect on the development of these internet markets. Meg Whitman has said in interviews that eBay, and I think Pierre Omidyard said the same thing, that, you know, eBay may not have gotten off the ground without Beanie Babies.

Joe, I know you remember what the late 1990s were like. When we look back on Beanie Babies, it seems amazing that people spent all this money on them, all this time. We had at least one instance of a guy committing murder because of a soured Beanie Baby deal. Do you remember how nuts it was? The late 90s, are you talking about Beanie Babies or just the late 90s in general? Both.

I mean, I would say they're linked, right? Oh, they're absolutely. The people who, when they think back and they talk about the 90s bubble, it's often referred to as a tech bubble or the internet bubble or the dot-com bubble, it completely misses the point. Yes, I love you. It was so much bigger. It was such a big. I like, the closest thing, I was like, it was a sense of optimism about everything all at the same time. And so there's so many wonderful stories about people completely losing their mind.

My single favorite story of the late 90s bubble was when a car dealership in Nevada it was called Unipriam Capital Acceptance. And I remember this very vividly because I was on the message boards at the time. It was a penny stock. Maybe you traded it 10 cents. This was Joe Day trading, right? I was. They put out a press release that said they had a cure for AIDS.

A car dealership in Nevada, they're like, oh, someone we've worked with or we licensed this thing from a scientist. is they just straight up, we have a cure for AIDS. And, you know, even in the craziest times, like, that's kind of a skeptical belief. But enough people believed it that the stock surged, it doubled, and then it doubled again, because just on the possibility that maybe a car dealership in Nevada had found a cure for AIDS, that people were so optimistic of everything that it seemed not 100% unbelievable. When people talk about the internet stocks, anything that breathed on the internet

people were going crazy for one of my favorite facts is the fact that KTel, the company that makes really cheesy compilation CDs of like 70s disco music, they sold their CDs online, big whoop. The stock grew tenfold at one point over the span of a few months. People were losing their minds. And then the other fact that I love is the fact that the segue

that didn't really take off, but people still go tours around. people really thought entire cities were going to be redesigned because of how the segue got people around. So basically, it was a time of just incredible optimism about everything. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader.

Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts. So, Zach, I'm curious, in your book, you quote a lot from existing, you know, economic and financial literature. You quote people like Robert Schiller on the optimism that precedes bubbles. When it comes to Beanie Babies, if you could kind of pinpoint one thing that flipped it, into speculative mania. What would it be? It's people seeing prices rise. That is what drives speculative bubbles is that as soon as there's, you know, this insignificant phenomenon of someone

who's trying to complete a set for their kid, as soon as they pay $100 for a Beanie Baby that someone paid $5 for, that's what sets in motion, or at least can set in motion, certainly, this kind of chain because that becomes a story. And Beanie Babies, and I think all All bubbles are spread by narrative, by people saying, I bought this Beanie Baby for $5 and sold it for 100. Anyone who did that told 1,000 people about it because it was so weird. So how big did it get in the end? Is there an estimate of what the total outstanding value of Beanie Babies was at the peak? Tye's annual sales peaked at around $1.5 billion.

And that was just wholesale, $250. Are there people who, there must be, but have a bunch and held it all the way down and now they live in a house filled with a bean? There is a retired soap opera star in Arizona. I can't remember what's been so long because I talked to him. There's a retired soap opera star who lost his kid's six-figure college funds on them and has like 30,000 of them still in his home. That's grim. We talked about how these sort of bubbles begin, at least in the case of Beanie Babies.

How did it end? Because it did start to fizzle out in 1999, and within a couple years, the secondary market value of thousands, millions of stuffed animals, was gone. This was one of the funniest things about the reporting on this. And I think there's a lot of very similar stuff with the reporting on the housing bubble and the internet stock bubble is that I would kind of pose this question to the collectors, anti-executives, about kind of how this thing had ended. And they all had these really specific explanations for it, these kind of linear cause and effect things, you know, like, you know, there was one person saying, oh,

you know, the counterfeits really invaded the market and people were paying, you know, $600. And if it hadn't for pieces, the turn to be fake. And if it hadn't been for all the fraud, this, you know, it wouldn't have ended that way. A lot of people felt, you know, Thai got greedy and made too many, too many styles and, and overproduced them. And I'm like, okay, you know, maybe kind of, but, you know, if he hadn't done that, then would they still be 10% of eBay sales and we'd all be rich? I mean, these things end because they're stupid, right?

Like, that's ultimately, they're unsustainable. And eventually, there is something that nicks them and causes that kind of, that kind of cascade of confidence that started it to just crescendo down. And that's what happened. There's this thing at the end of 1998. Everything's still basically going well. Secondary market sales, still good. Top piece is still valuable.

some overproduction and some of the newer pieces. Those are stacking up a little bit, but basically still a strong market. No one's saying this thing's ending. Collector's still confident. Magazine's still selling. And Ty announces at the end of 1998 that on January 1st, 1999, all of the Beanie babies will be retired. Whoa. And that they won't be made anymore.

Theoretically, prices should have gone through the roof at that point, right? For a minute. Yeah. they did for a minute and people were very excited and people were like what's going on this is he going to do a different product and then he announced that he would do a vote to raise money for aides on whether people wanted to beanie babies to continue and you would log in and online and donate there were some other stuff going on in his life but where you could donate a dollar 49 I think it was to vote on whether beanie babies should be continued first I'll raise the question of who would

spend $1.50 to vote to end Beanie Babies. Weird. So he does this and almost no one voted. Ended up just having to donate all the money himself because he hadn't gotten as many votes as he claimed he had and announced that Beanie Babies would be continued and that all the new releases, there would be all these new millennium collection coming out and no one cared.

And the whole thing just every month after that, the sales collapsed and people started to... So that caused a real crisis of conflict. confident about the one source of this product. And then what happened was so these retired beanie babies, I remember talking to one of the first collectors who was on her way back from speaking at a Beanie Baby convention as a paid expert, you know, like a keynote speaker on Beanie Babies. And she was at the O'Hare Airport.

And she saw a stack of Beanie Babies that were still $5 in the store but were retired. And this was like mind-blowing. I mean, people thought it was a law of physics that a retired Beanie Baby was worth more than $5. and that that was just true. And, I mean, kind of like, you know, hoven prices don't go down. None of the models included that. None of their models include the idea

that a retired Beanie Baby could conceivably still just be worth the retail price. So one of my favorite sayings on Wall Street is that the only thing that's a bubble, well, something becomes a bubble once the bubble burst. Anything else is a great trade, right? You just made tons of money. Yes.

When you look around the world, it seems like we are continuously seeing warnings about bubbles, again in tech, lots of other areas and financial markets. Having studied the science of stuffed animals, do you have any wisdom for how we can spot bubbles? Before they burst in real time. Before they burst, yeah. I mean, I, you know, I think the thing just behaviorally is that when what is driving it

is entirely stories about how much money people have been making on it, that's something to be really concerned about. And I think any time you have a kind of surge of interest in new entrance into a field based on sort of past successes of other ones. There was a ton of that with the internet bubble. You had legitimate companies go public first. And then the next one, you know, this is going to be the next that. And that was a piece of crap. So I think those are, you know, anytime you see.

Well, to me, you know, to bring your point to the current era, you know, we've been hearing about a possible tech bubble. for the last 10 years. I mean, when Facebook was valued at a billion dollars, people said, tech bubble, and now it's worth hundreds of times that. But I did see an ad on Instagram this week that was promising how to make your billion dollar app, like a service that would teach people how to make an app that would be worth a billion dollars. And that reminds me of like telling stories just about the money is a next level of the euphoria. I always love those like J.P. Morgan's do shine Bowie stories about bubbles. I think those are...

Oh, yeah. That's a great story. I mean, I remember when I was in high school, my bus driver, and this was dangerous because he was driving a bus full of kids, and he had two cell phones, and he was flipping houses while he was driving, talking to his, like, real estate agent and his manager. And I just so, I always look for things like that. Yeah, and I remember in 1999, when that year I had a summer job, we'd go to the pizza place, and they would also, while it was just a little pizza shop, and they would

also have a rival financial network to Bloomberg on TV all the time. And, you know, the pizza, you know, that was what the pizza guys were watching was CNBC. Wow. Rival network. Well said. So, Joe, you actually managed to make some money from internet stocks. How did you time it? Because it seems like the timing is key here. Lots of people did get rich off Beanie Babies and lots of people got really poor. It was really, it was the best luck I've ever had. I was trading through the basically Christmas break of 2000 and, or 19, anyway, 2000. And then I had to study, I studied abroad in Switzerland in the spring of 2000. And before I left, I sold all my stocks because I was like, I'm not going to be able to trade while I'm studying

abroad. That just didn't seem plausible. And then the bubble burst while I was studying abroad. So out of pure luck with no insight. You need to craft that into a narrative about your own foresight. No, just the opposite. That's just pure luck. I just happened to sell like a couple months before the peak. So that, that worked out well. All right. So you made thousands off internet stocks and I made 200 bucks from a single Beanie Baby. Yeah, but you got to cuddle it. So that's... Okay. I'm not sure. All right, Zach, it was lovely having you on the show. Thank you so much. This is fun. It's great. Thank you. All right, Joe, we just had a really interesting, entertaining conversation.

What did you learn? I actually think my favorite single fact was that point about the magazine and the relationship between seeing prices written down and seeing prices move and then the effect that has on actual prices. I think that's a fascinating point. Right. I just love the idea that this group of soccer moms in Chicago became market tycoons, basically. And I hadn't thought about that before this idea of they're needing to be a complete set. of them. And so it sort of creates this inherent scarcity to them that drives up demand. That was

an aspect of the Beanie Baby boom that I had not realized before. All right. Well, artificial scarcity is a hot topic in economics right now. Maybe that's something for another podcast. This is Tracy Alloway. You can find me at Tracy Alloway on Twitter. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Find me at at the stalwart on Twitter. And if you want to follow Zach, he's on Twitter too at Zach Bissonette. And thank you for listening to Odd Lots. Tune in next time. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris.

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