Time to dust off your Beanie Babies: These dolls are selling for $100k!

My first ever Beanie Baby was Stripes the tiger, a fellow Gemini. It was 1996, and the Beanie Baby phenomena was the biggest thing to ever happen to the ’90s, and a LOT of big things happened to the ’90s. Kids collected them, adults collected them, everyone was collecting Beanie Babies with blind faith that they would be worth something in like twenty years, and it was CRAZY.

But twenty years have come and gone, and Beanie Babies are really not as lucrative as we projected them to be. In fact, the toys so many people invested hundreds and hundreds (some, even thousands) of dollars in, are worth almost nothing now. This miscalculation wasn’t totally our faults —EVERYONE thought the price of Beanie Babies would skyrocket. In the ’90s, you could buy a Beanie Baby “handbook” that estimated how much each baby would be worth in 2008. My little guy Stripes, for instance, was supposed to be worth a THOUSAND dollars. But in actuality, you can buy him for about ten bucks or less on Ebay. Womp womp.

This doesn’t mean Beanie Baby diehards have given up. Not a chance. If you visit Ebay, you can buy Humphrey the Camel (first generation!) for $285. A very rare Princess Diana Beanie Baby bear is going for $2,000. But the most dedicated of sellers and the most hopeful for a Beanie Baby comeback, is selling his/her collection for $100,000.

And we totally salute this person for doing what we just aren’t brave enough to do. What if this inflates the prices of Beanie Babies? What if this starts a Beanie Baby revolution, and we can FINALLY sell those stuffed animals that have been hanging out in our parent’s attics for the last decade? You never, ever know.

But before you start dusting off your tattered, used collection, consider the reason these bad-boys are so pricey. According to the seller, “these Beanie Babies are more than 16 years old. . . they are rare and hard to find. . .and have been carefully stored away and were not played with.” They also still have their tags on them.

The collection includes a variety of bears, including the original Princess Di, along with Valentina, Birthday Bear, and Millennium, and they’re all in mint-condition! There’s also a “Beanie Baby Club Kit” with a Beanie Baby inside the kit named, appropriately, “Clubby II.”

While we’re not prepared financially to fork over that much cash, we’re all about this ambitious price-tag. If nothing else, people who’ve long collected things so meticulously and with such care deserve a chance to have their acts of preservation taken seriously. Sadly, it seems as though the seller may have already faced some Internet backlash: “Bullying or harassment is not okay in any shape or form,” states the seller. “You may find this listing funny, but this is not a joke,” the seller writes, adding, “Be a leader and not a follower.”

Hey, that’s always a message we can get behind. Let’s hope someone bites, so we can all start selling our BBs for what we thought they’d be worth in 2015.

(Image via Ebay)