Garcia, the tie-dyed teddy, first sold for $5 and is
already worth 20 times that amount.
That’s quite a
hill of beans
Your McDonald's
By Burl Burlingame
Teenie Beanie is already
going up in value
Star-BulletinDave Wallace has proved to be something of an enigma to other venders at the swap meet. People line up to buy his products, "forking over cash as fast as I can operate the cash register," he laughs.
"Most of the other venders are hard-working immigrants, God bless 'em, and they come up and try to figure out what I'm doing that's so successful. And all they see are these little bean-filled toy animals. They go away shaking their heads. Crazy Americans."
What Wallace is selling, and the reason he's known as "Mr. Beanie," are Beanie Babies, the soft plush animals made by the Ty toy company that have become something of a national passion.
In the last couple of weeks, a Happy Meals promotion for "Teenie Beanie Babies" has scoured the shelves clean at most local McDonald's. These giveaway toys can be bought for $8 and more now at swap meets -- if you can find one.
Wallace made $1,700 in six hours at the flea market Saturday, nothing to sneeze at, even for "a guy who actually makes his living hanging lights for movie shoots."
Teenie Beanie Twigs is the rarest of the McDonald's set
and is already worth an estimated $20.
It started for Wallace when he saw one of the rare toys being sold for $200, and decided he needed a piece of the action. Wallace discovered that Beanie Babies had been sold since the early 1990s in smaller stores, not in large chains, that the manufacturer made each toy as individual as possible and often "retired" certain toys to create artificial demand, and that the distribution was cannily and intentionally haphazard, turning Beanie collecting from a simple shopping trip into a kind of treasure hunt.A couple of years ago, interest in collecting the toys began to ramp up on the mainland and spread to the islands. "When I sell, it's about 50-50 split between local clientele and tourists," said Wallace. "The average customer isn't a kid. It's a woman between 25 and 50, and typically they spend about $60 at a crack."
Robert Loera, who owns Kite Fantasy in Lahaina, an official Ty outlet, had Beanie Babies sitting on his shelves for years. "Then last summer, tourists began buying them all up," he said. "They'd come in and ask how many they could buy. Was there an upper limit? I'd never heard anyone ask that in a retail store before. They'd buy $500 worth of Beanies. Wow!"
Wallace owns just one Beanie -- the bat. "Why? Well ... I kinda like bats. I'm not a collector," he said. "I'm a broker, a trader in commodities."
Wallace gets his Beanies primarily through "secondary markets," Ty retailers who will sell him maybe half their stock. His contacts are proprietary and took a while to build up, and so when other venders ask where THEY can score some of these hot-selling toys, Wallace is deliberately not much help.
By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Taylor Wagen sells Beanie Babies at
the Kam Drive-In Swap Meet.
The deal Ty gives to shops such as Kite Fantasy is simple: A $7,000 limit, and no more than 36 of any style. "And often you'll only get $4,000, and not everything you ask for," said Loera. "But the guy down the street may have gotten them. So the consumers have to go from store to store. It's genius marketing."I'm convinced that Ty has some sort of super-duper computer that makes distribution deliberately random, and yet keeps the market from being over-saturated."
Ty also frowns on stores marking prices up. "They're sending out harsh letters to Ty venders who mark up the toys beyond the suggested retail, because then it's no longer a toy that kids can afford."
Wallace said that one outlet in the airport marked up Beanies from $8 to $15 in only a couple of weeks.
Counterfeit Beanies are becoming a problem. "When you've got toy bears worth $2,300, sure, you're going to get fakes," said Wallace. "Some are really good knock-offs. Thank goodness for the Internet: There are lots of Beanie pages telling you how to spot counterfeits."
Both Wallace and Loera said the primary smugglers are flight attendants returning from the Far East.
Seen any purple-blue Peanuts? Only a few thousand Peanut the Elephant Beanies were made before Ty decided it didn't like that color. This makes it the rarest Beanie, typically going for $5,000 or more.
"I saw someone pay $5,500 for one at the toy expo last week," said Wallace. "Everyone's got different-sized wallets. This one was for for a kid who had ALL the Beanies except that one."
That's one way of communicating with your kids. Wallace said he sees a lot of mother-daughter teams haunting the Beanie tables, laughing and having a good time. "The good thing about the toy is that it's universal."
Not quite. Beaniemania is a North America -- and recently European -- phenomenon. The rest of the world doesn't amount to a hill of Beanies. Not yet.
When Loera gets in new Beanies, he puts them on the shelf at random times so that kids have an equal shot at purchasing the toy. "I usually wait until school is out, after 3:30," he said.
"The hard-core collectors, the ones who put the toys in acrylic cases, are still a minority," said Wallace.
"The regular buyer is still a guy who sees a cute $5 toy, buys it and rips off the tag and gives it to his kid, who sucks on its head all day. Gee, Dad, it's only a toy. Get a grip."
