The Truth About Value
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
Many of you that follow me on social media have been keeping up with my road trip. As we’ve been making our way across the states this week from Jersey to Colorado, we’ve found a variety of ways to keep ourselves entertained. The less exciting being working (benefits of work from anywhere!) and the more exciting being interesting podcasts. One that made the list this week was the Beanie Babies episode of The Dollop.
This is a saga that I lived as a child of the 90s, owning dozens of beanie babies myself, but I didn’t realize how much of the chaos I was not exposed to as child. What created the Beanie Babies boom was not the children, but rather the adult collectors that became obsessed with owning every bean-filled animal. This was something that did not start when they were released in 1993, but only a few years later when a marketing move by the owner tipped the scales.
Now the owner, Ty Warner, was not a great person. There are many interviews stating he was selfish, not good to work with, and he had accusations of abuse from his partner. So, keep that in mind when I tell you what he did to make Beanie Babies so popular.
When the product was just starting to gain some traction, a supplier of one of their most popular animals went out of business. They could therefore no longer provide the material needed for that particular Beanie and so they were going to have to discontinue it. Rather than saying “discontinued” though, they chose to say “retired”. That one simple distinction changed everything. Now, instead of a frustrated population of collectors, they were suddenly driven into a frenzy with the need to find the retired beanie now, that it was no longer readily available. This would have just been a genius marketing move, but Ty took it too far.
Rather than genuinely retiring animals, they started announcing future retirees in advance, intentionally manipulating the market as the company saw fit. If something wasn’t selling, Ty would simply retire it which would drive up the sales and exponentially increase the value on the black market. This is not like baseball cards that increase with value as the human behind the card makes history; this is one selfish man behind the scenes deciding that he’s going to manipulate people into buying his crappy under-performing products.
And in case you missed that, yes, there was a black market for Beanie Babies.
What I found so interesting about this story is that the actual value of Beanie Babies in stores never changed. In stores they were always just $5, but it was the collectors that were paying tens of thousands of dollars to get the babies they were missing, which drove more people to purchasing. There were divorcing couples who were dividing their babies up on the courtroom floor in front of a judge! These little stuffed animal toys that had no real value suddenly had value because a group of people (manipulated by a corrupt business) decided it was so.
As you go through life and put your money, time, and energy into different things, give yourself a value check every once in a while. Is this thing you are committed to, actually valuable? Will it have a return on investment, or does it only seem valuable because others have declared it so? What the Beanie Babies saga teaches us is that we have all the power when it comes to value. We get to decide if something is worth it or not.
