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Title details for The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette - Available

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble

Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute

by Zac Bissonnette
P.J. Ochlan
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s
In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. In just three years, collectors who saw the toys as a means of speculation made creator Ty Warner, an eccentric college dropout, a billionaire—without advertising or big-box distribution. Beanie Babies were ten percent of eBay's sales in its early days, with an average selling price of $30—six times the retail price. At the peak of the bubble in 1999, Warner reported a personal income of $662 million—more than Hasbro and Mattel combined.
The end of the craze was swift and devastating, with "rare" Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they'd once been deemed priceless.
Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews (including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the strangest speculative mania of all time.
"In spare, elegant prose, Zac Bissonnette tells the riveting story of Ty Warner and how he ruthlessly built Beanie Babies into a mania as misguided and regrettable as the ones involving tulips in Holland in 1637 and mortgage-backed securities in New York in 2008. "
          - William D. Cohan, author of Money & Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
 
"The amazing story of the time the world lost its mind over little beanbag critters named Punchers, Humphrey, and Wingless Quackers. In The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Zac Bissonnette takes us on a journey into the secretive world of the man behind the mania, Ty Warner."
          - Bill Dedman, co-author of the bestselling biography Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.
"A fresh and darkly comic look at how the rise of internet commerce went hand-in-hand with soccer moms and "irrational exuberance" to transform a cheap children's toy into a national mania and one of the greatest speculative bubbles in American history.  The Great Beanie Baby Bubble will leave you shaking your head and wistfully remembering the wild, wild ride that was the late 1990s. "
           - Tilar Mazzeo, author of The Widow Cliquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It
 
"A carnival ride through the American psyche."
          - Edward Dolnick, author of The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 3, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780553545029
      • File size: 247676 KB
      • Duration: 08:35:59

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 15, 2014
      Bissonnette (Debt-Free U) does a masterful job of tracing the rise and fall of the Beanie Baby phenomenon of the 1990s, reminding readers that in 1998, a whopping 64% of Americans owned at least one of the small stuffed animals. Although Beanie Babies creator Ty Warner designed the toys for young children, the likes of Brownie the Bear and Chocolate the Moose soon became frantically sought-after possessions among adults, who viewed them as investments that could only increase in value. Warner, a marketing master, drove up sales by periodically retiring characters, a strategy that kept fanatic collectors buying Beanie Babies in bulk out of fear that supply would dry up. At the height of the craze, the $5 plushies were selling for hundreds of dollars. This cautionary tale of elevated consumerism, with collectors fretting over what they didn’t have rather than taking pleasure in what they did, serves as a useful history lesson for today, told with wit and subtlety.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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