LogFAQs > #926594528

Broken_Zeus posted...

But good lord, Franklin Mint was stupidly pricey. They had things like 36-month payment plans for chess sets. A lot of furniture isn't even financed for that long.

I never went that route. But I do have a couple commemorative coins ($5 face value in the Marshall Islands!) for space stuff. I think one was for the moon landing and one was one of the space shuttles. I haven't looked at them in like 30+ years so I don't really remember.

I'm sure they aren't worth much more than $5 today, though.



Broken_Zeus posted...

I do so get a kick out of recognizing a Beanie Baby that once was estimated as being $75 sitting on the shelf for $1. It's a little depressing when I find them not just with the tag protectors, but also mylar-bagged because those guys *really* thought they were protecting an investment.

I was never really into Beanies when they were huge, though a friend of mine worked at a Kay-Bee and literally traded them like underground currency in the mall. He'd basically stash half the store's supply, then trade one to the guy in EB for a specific game he wanted, or to someone else for other stuff. Sort of like that one episode of Married With Children where Al sets up a massive trading ring in his mall.

Even at the time I was fully aware that it was a bubble that was going to burst.

It's funny, but my childhood contained the Video Game Crash of 1983 and the Comic Book Crash of 1993. Those two events taught me a LOT about investment, bubbles, supply and demand, and various other finance concepts that are surprisingly useful when you're an adult and dealing with stocks and markets in general.



Broken_Zeus posted...

I think the most I paid for any Beanie Baby during that rush was $13 for either Tracker the Hound or the Jack-o-Lantern one. Not entirely sure I own either of my original ones, although I bought a Tracker for $2 from Savers a few years ago. My Beanie Baby collection today is so much larger than when they first came out and that's mostly just because I find them so cheap that I figure when I get bored of them I'll just give them away to young relatives and friends' kids.

I bought a bunch years after the initial boom period (at cheap face value in my local grocery store - I'd basically just buy one every third shopping trip or so on a whim), but less because I thought they'd ever have value and more just because I liked them (most of them are monkeys, though I have a cow and a pig too, and maybe a couple others). I still have them packed away somewhere, with all of my stuffed animals and things that weren't destroyed at some point in the 80s (I lost a lot of my early childhood stuff to a ceiling leak, but my family are obsessive pack-rats bordering on hoarders, so I still have a LOT of books and toys and comics and stuff in general from my childhood, mostly just packed away).

I also own my own personal Chinese Zodiac Beanie (I'm a Dragon, ROAR motherfuckers!), which in turn led me to start a tradition of giving my friends' kids a Zodiac Beanie for their 1st birthday (which, if memory serves, wound up being a Hare, a Snake, and two Roosters). I liked the symbolism of it.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family