Remember Beanie Babies? I do, and always will, because I worked at the bookstore that sold Beanie Babies at the mall the first Christmas after they were invented.

I took the bookstore job because I love books and this particular store was the last independent bookstore in town. That fact appealed to my leftist tendencies and chronic sympathy for the underdog, as did the employee hefty discount on books and greeting cards. The owner did mention, "...and of course we sell Beanie Babies, that's our real bread and butter," but I was living in a hermetically sealed bubble of ideals and ideas at the time and didn't really know that much about Beanie Babies, much less the total insanity the little buggers were capable of unleashing. How hard could it be to ring up stuffed toys?

I was about to find out.

Every week Tyco, the maker of Beanie Babies would announce the birth of a new beanie. It would have a name like Boopy or Smoopy or Loopy and come with a little red heart-shaped tag that marked its name and birthday with the Tyco logo. Each Beanie Baby was a different kind of stuffed animal, so for example, Boopy might be a slug, Smoopy a mongoose, Loopy a cuddly tapeworm and so on and so forth. Afficionados of the lovable little beasts were mad to be the first to have the latest issue straight out of the Tyco birth canal. They would be smashed up against the metal chain curtain that separated the store from the mall long before opening time, hundreds of them. The store opened at 10:00 am, and by 9:45 am they were already making scary throng noises and rattling the chains. If by some chance 10:01 came and the chain was not lifted, it got ugly real fast. Opening the store was a carefully choreographed task: to slip up was to invite serious injury, or worse.

On this particular Christmas Beanie Birthday, it wasn't Jesus the crowd was after but Goopy the Christmas snail(or some such creature), complete with Santa hat and jingle bell, the first ever Christmas Beanie, the Beanie born to save humankind from our its rotten consumerist madness by causing the wicked to kill each other for their own greedy sins. Our normal procedure would be to have boxes of Goopies behind the counter and then dole them out one at a time, only one per customer, for the rest of the day or until Goopy was gone, which typically would be in less than an hour. Then we'd spend the rest of the day telling angry people that we were out of Goopies, but that we had a great special on the complete

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