It was just an online classified ad, under Collectibles for Sale, but it sounded like a cry from the heart: "I'm tired of these things now. Please save me from them."
Kelly Cabral of Tracy, Calif., placed the ad recently after coming across a box in her garage crammed with dozens and dozens of Beanie Babies, the floppy little stuffed animals that sparked an international trading frenzy in the late 1990s.
Years earlier, there were days when Kelly and her husband, Dan, would join the early-morning crowds laying siege to gift shops that were expecting shipments of Beanies.
There were times when the Cabrals would post themselves at different McDonald's outlets to buy stacks of Happy Meals in hopes of scoring a few of the promotional Teenie Beanie Babies they didn't already own.
"I don't want the food," Kelly would say when she reached the counter. "I just want the Beanie Babies."
Now, she says, "My husband's like, 'Where did we get all these?' Then you realize you spent way too much time on this insanity."
Whether a Beanies collection now resides in a cut-glass display case or the back of a closet may depend on the owner's level of embarrassment. Some former collectors cringe when they think of the plush critters, just as certain investors do when they recall Internet crash-and-burns such as Webvan or Pets.com.
In many ways, in fact, the Beanie Baby mania was the dot-com stock bubble writ small.
Both were creatures of a frothy, peacetime economy with low unemployment and towering consumer confidence. Both were abetted by the advent of online trading and the explosive growth of the Internet. Both gave rise to celebrity oracles who seemed able to decode the mysteries of the market. Both spawned fraud and even episodes of violence. And, finally, both flouted all classical notions of investment value. Until they didn't.
Beanie Babies, as aficionados know, are the brainchild of H. Ty Warner, 59, chairman and owner of Ty Inc., based in the Chicago suburb of Westmont, Ill.
Forbes magazine ranks Warner as the 65th richest person on Earth, worth an estimated $6 billion, ahead of Los Angeles insurance and real estate tycoon Eli Broad, Staples Center owner Philip Anschutz and Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos.
Warner's fortune was built on Beanie Babies, helping fund his purchases in recent years of New York's Four Seasons hotel, as well as San Ysidro Ranch, Four Seasons Biltmore Hotel and Sandpiper Golf Club in Santa Barbara.
