Sorry, Collectors, Nobody Wants Your Beanie Babies Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, Collectors, Nobody Wants Your Beanie Babies Anymore

wsj.com

38 pointskgwgk60 comments

> and concluded the small stuffed animals, a craze from the 1990s, will one day soar in value, like the bitcoins he bought in early January.

Bitcoin. Beanie Babies. The Beanie Babies aren't worth anything by themselves, but I think I may see a solution here.

A Beanie Babies coin. Beanie Babies owners get a chance at the earliest and cheapest rounds of the ICO. Rare Beanie Babies bring the owner better discounts.

Demand for the coin will push demand for Beanie Babies, making them rise in value along with the coin value.

Beanie Babies could potentially be traded physically like real currency.

Is this enough for a whitepaper?

ETA: Fixed spelling issues in the whitepaper.

Beanie Babies are decentralized, and not double-spendable, whilst being pretty anonymous and not requiring a cohort of miners wasting electricity to mine them. They are in finite supply, and are not stealable by hackers. And like fiat, they apparently lose value (which is a good thing for a currency) Pretty good currency IMO.

Aren't burglars just ownership hackers?

They're domicile disruptors.

To be clear, your opinion is that an inflationary currency is a good thing.

They are easy to forge.

At least the SEC won’t wreck your life once they decide to really move, if all you’re moving is plush toys.

Reading this I thought: Welcome to the cryptocurrency trough of disillusionment.

Slap that on to a website with some particles.js and I think you're set to retire.

>Is this enough for a whitepaper?

"Bitcoin. Beanie Babies." was enough for a whitepaper.

> A Beanie Babies coin.

You're too late

https://www.cryptokitties.co/

I think you’re ready

> since the 1990s children—millennials—aren’t collecting like generations before them.

I would say (being a 1989 baby), that it isn't due to a lack of wanting, it's due to the systematic mass production of anything and everything. There is nothing worth collecting anymore, because there are 10 billion other copies of that thing... I mean, there are now more than 1,000 Pokémon when there were only 150/151 when I was a child. My holo-Charizard isn't worth anything these days.

>there are now more than 1,000 Pokémon

Only 807 so far: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon...

Oops, I think my cousin mentioned the >1k and I just took him at his word. The official Pokémon site says that 80x number as well (they gave 806).

https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokedex/

In terms of mass produced card game stuff, I think MTG cards still seem to be making an attempt with additions like foil cards, mythic rares, and the masterpiece cards.

I think maybe virtual items like the stuff from lootboxes / items on steam could be filling some of the role for younger folks. And the pokemon go fad from a few years ago may show there is still a massive collector drive lying dormant in society.

If it's a shadowless first edition Charizard, I'll happily make you an offer. Collectors don't necessarily need the "complete set" just because the content creators continue to churn out new additions.

^ catching them all is so hard now.

I was searching for a copy of an out-of-print book that I wanted to read but all were $150+, which was more than I wanted to pay. Somehow I stumbled on an eBay link that had the book for ~$40, but the item was removed yet not sold. I clicked on the seller and it turns out they relisted it in the $150 range, in line with the rest of the "market". The book was sitting there for over a year. It was sitting there for over a year at the cheaper price, too. If it wasn't selling at the low price, why would it sell higher? Even with "arbitrageurs" surely looking for those opportunities.

Maybe not the most relevant, but I'm willing to bet most collector markets are pretty irrational.

Much of the used book market is about buying a ton of books for cheap and only selling a small fraction of them for a lot. If you buy 100 books for $3 each and sell 5 of them over 5 years for $100 each and another 5 for $50 each you make decent money (idk exact numbers but I have several friends in the industry doing 6-7 figs).

A lot of it depends on who has the most accurate data. If you know something has sold for $50+ say 5 times in the last 3 years you can pay more for it than an unknown. The long tail is interesting and tough to work.

I buy a lot of old books that aren't that easy to find anymore. In such situations in the past, I have managed to buy the book by contacting the seller directly and telling them I'll buy it right away for some percentage of the price (50-80%). It has worked a few times.

I thought about trying that; good to know that it can work, thank you.

Maybe that was an arbitrage: someone who didn't have the book but was betting they could obtain it for less than the cost.

That would just be a bet. It's not an arbitrage if you don't know it will work.

Does the relisting fit into that scheme (other than indicating that it failed)?

I'd ask how come nobody ran a money laundering scheme with those collectibles, but then, anyone who succeeds in a money laundering scheme isn't exactly aching to tell the story.

Maybe that's a testament to the work of the IRS.

You know about Lego-backed money laundering? http://www.vocativ.com/underworld/crime/lego-heists/index.ht...

Interesting that people are making inferences about Beanie Babies from Bitcoin rather than the other way around.

Ty Warner got the last laugh on this craze. His Boeing Business Jet (an ultra-luxe 737) is usually parked at the Santa Barbara airport.

The current resale prices of some 8 bit micros from the 1980s sometimes match or exceed the original sale price. Not a good investment if you bought new but I imagine that many HN readers might be kicking themselves about things they threw in the trash.

They are probably useful machines for the paranoid, if you want to do basic spreadsheets etc. without being backdoored. These babies are as air-gapped as you can get.

You can probably TEMPEST hack them with a crystal set, though.

Which ones, if you remember? Same price as in the 80s is still discounted, inflation-adjusted.

This Amazon listing wants £295 for a ZX81 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Sinclair-ZX81-Spectrum-Pro...

Or this TRS80 for £500 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Radio-Shack-TRS-80-MODEL-100-PORT...

Of course they might not sell for the listed price, there are other listing with lower bids. I don’t know a good way to get an accurate figure for what things typically sell for on ebay etc.

To get accurate prices on ebay, check the filtering options in search results for your query and tick "Sold Listings."

It will then show only recently sold listings along with what they sold for. Completed listings that didn't sell because they were listed with unreasonable prices will not show up.

Ah yeah, those are quite pricey, especially the ZX81, which is pretty barebones even for a Sinclair. I think I have a couple of ZX81 kits sitting around somewhere that I picked up in the late 90s. They cost about $30 a pop at the time.

My father picked up a Timex Sinclair 1000 at a grocery store for $30 it had the 16k expansion but was not built correctly so he bought a Commodore 64 later to replace it.

The Jupiter Ace is particularly valuable. There's one on Ebay right now at 1400 dollars.

Todays equivalent would be those Funko PopVinyl figures. I'm amazed at how many people thìnk they are worth something when theres hundreds of rudimentary looking figures for every cult favorite movie, videogame, and cartoon.

The hype around rapidly increasing values on Pop Vinyls has largely gone, the market seems to have chilled and the reason it hasn't crashed likely to be because of the value attached to the licenses. The most interesting part of the whole thing I found was the effect valuing sites had on the market (i.e. poppriceguide). They significantly lowered the effort in determining value for existing collectors and attracted a lot of people whole wouldn't normally collect to get into it purely for the profit to be gained. I am not suggesting others wouldn't have been attracted to the market without them but having the data readily available rather than having to trawl eBay completed sales lowered the barrier of entry.

Don’t people usually buy those because they like their favorite characters though?

Or is there some way to read this article without a subscription to WSJ? Does every geek already have a subscription?

https://outline.com/BKDd54

Use the Facebook redirect method:

https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/so...

Search the article title on google, click the first link. It usually works.

When it doesn't, I hit F12 and start deleting some nodes.

Update the URL to be fullwsj, instead of wsj. Facebook account is required.

Just learned this today from an earlier Hacker News Post

Clicking the “web” link on HN and then clicking the first result on google worked for me.

Instead of wsj.com/xyz Use fullwsj.com/xyz

You can go to twitter.com/search and find a link article from them incognito that allows you to read it.

Honestly, you’re not missing much.

All things come back. So in another 10-15 years they'll be valuable again. But not those God awful evil look dolls they make now.

The problem is explained at the end though. They were made to be collected. Mass produced collectable rarely really explode in value because they are kept preciously by their owner. If there was 10K "rare" beanie, chances are there are still the same 10K available. The buyer market however is much smaller.

That happens with plenty of stuff even in the antique range. Japanese, Chinese export silverware/tableware from beginning of the last century trade for poundland level pricing. Dragon-ware or similar stuff brought back by US soldier looks fancy and is similarly worth hardly anything. Even the rarest, best quality lithophane are very reasonable in price i.e. in the tens of dollar range. A good, purchased to be used, brand of tableware from similar period can cost 10 times more, rarest pieces going for hundreds.

I think it'll take a lot longer than that, it'll take years for a majority of them to be thrown away before they're rare enough to be worth anything.

Literally every family I know had an enormous collection of them. That fad was huge.

Beanie babies aren't worth anything because the people who grew up with them aren't in their 40s and 50s yet.

My immediate reaction is "didn't beanie babies 'tulip' years ago?" For that matter don't most 'collectibles' introduced to be collectible do pretty much the same?

At least Magic: the Gathering cards could be used to play a game.

> At least Magic: the Gathering cards could be used to play a game

The fact that MtG cards and tournaments are more popular than ever, while beanie babies are an utter flop, tells you all you need to know about designing collectibles for the sole purpose of being collectibles.

Very few mass-produced items achieve collectible status, and as far as I know, they do so accidentally. Anyone manufacturing something to be marketed as such is hoping to exploit the same set of irrationalities that drive speculative bubbles and Ponzi schemes, but without the risk of being prosecuted for securities fraud. Those irrationalities are bolstered by those few cases that have made the grade, and the practice of salting a large number of generic items with a few rare ones appeals to the jackpot fallacy.

Exactly. The junk I collect (video games) is primarily for use, rather than some other value.

I've got a crate full of my mother-in-law's Hummel figurines and plates that says nope.

No mention of tulips?

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