Early on, Beanie Babies represented 10 percent of eBay’s sales. The frenzy coincided with the start of eBay and the rise of home Internet use. Instead, she was the talk of countless parents, who came to believe they, too, could fund their kids’ college education or an early retirement if they just got their hands on the right Beanies. If she were a hedge fund trader with those numbers, she’d be the talk of Wall Street for generations. She paid $2,000, including shipping, for a box of the toys that, back in the United States, had a value of $300,000, a return of nearly 15,000 percent. Peggy Gallagher, an early trader, discovered that the Beanie craze hadn’t hit Germany yet and placed an order with a distributor in Nuremberg. There were articles and TV segments about moms and dads who traded a $5 toy for thousands of dollars. Their trading spread and, eventually, went national. They established some informal rules: Two Tabasco the Bull Beanies were equivalent to one of the rarer Kiwi the Toucan Beanies. Then, a handful of neighbors in the Chicago suburbs discovered that each had a small collection and started trading with one another. Beanie Babies, the small stuffed animals that retailed for $5, were introduced in 1993 and soon languished with mediocre sales.
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