by Zach Bigalke

Created on: March 27, 2007   Last Updated: November 25, 2008

The reason that any collecting fad (such as the explosion of interest that flooded American society with the release of Beanie Babies by Ty Warner in 1996) eventually dies out is because there is no attachment to the collectible other than its perceived value. Once the market for these furry bean-bag animal collectibles bottomed out, all that remained was the pennies on the dollar that had gone into the materials of the toy. Collectibles invented merely to be collectible rarely engender lasting support among the general public. Artificial value becomes increasingly exaggerated as a wider variety and increased quantities of these toys hit store shelves. Marketing can only keep a Ponzi scheme such as Beanie Babies alive for so long...to survive, a collectible must have value or meaning beyond its face value.

Conversely, baseball cards remain a memorabilia staple precisely because they can hold so much meaning and knowledge beyond their condition and worth. Keith Olbermann, television impressario and baseball-card historian extraordinaire, wrote in his book co-written with Dan Patrick, "The Big Show", that he became disenfranchised with collecting when a nine-year-old kid walked up to him and asked about the investment value of a particular card. The reason baseball cards have become such beloved collectibles, passed from generation to generation, is that they evoke emotions of historical events. A particular picture can resonate with a collector and recreate memories devoid of dollar figures.

Beanie Babies and the collecting fad they spawned started to fizzle about three years after their inception. Children did not buy into the craze because their toys had to remain untampered (i.e. tags remaining on toy, unbent/uncreased, dirt/cookie/mud-free) and collecting dust. Parents recognized the prohibitive costs of the toy coupled with their children's disinterest and refrained from continuing their purchases of the next model. Much like the Cabbage Patch Kids craze of the 1980s, the fad died predictably and necessarily. Each product remains, in some form, on the market, but the collector craze has dissipated. A toy must remain usable to remain interesting to a child; without children desiring a toy, there is merely fiduciary fuzzy math keeping prices inflated for overage collectors...

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