This Doll’s Worth Some Serious Beans
I held the cute little thing in my hand and asked her to make me an offer.
She seemed impressed. “Two hundred dollars,” she said, without hesitation.
Why, oh, why must life be filled with so many ethical dilemmas?
This one began innocently enough, Christmas before last. My sister gave me a Beanie Baby doll known as “the Garcia Bear.” He’s a cuddly little guy with tie-dyed coloring, in honor of the late Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia. It cost $5.
A few weeks ago, my sister phoned, all atwitter.
“Do you still have the Garcia Bear?” she said.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, although not exactly sure at that instant what she was talking about.
“Sell it,” she said. She had heard that the bears were selling for as much as $100.
Figuring she had finally flipped her lid, I humored her. Eventually, she convinced me that, as absurd as it sounded, those little Beanie Babies have become collectors’ items. Somehow, that phenomenon had slipped past my radar.
OK, OK, I told her, I’ll sell.
Then I got to thinking: What kind of a guy would sell his sister’s Christmas present?
That became a much stickier question after sitting at a table this week with Kim Barlow, a 40-year-old Costa Mesa mother of three who says she’s put on at least 20 Beanie Baby trade shows since last summer. I showed her my Garcia Bear, she pronounced it in mint condition, noted that the original tag is still on, which enhances its value, and priced it at $200.
Two hundred bucks for a stuffed animal? God bless America.
Like baseball cards before them, Beanie Babies have been transformed in the last five years from seemingly benign childhood possessions into major commodities. The most valuable is a royal blue Peanuts the Elephant, which has been priced as high as $5,200, Barlow says.
The dolls’ cuteness generated widespread appeal and their relative rarity helped fuel the market, she says. The Illinois-based distributor has “retired” some dolls, increasing their value for people who want complete sets of Beanie Babies. Thus, much in the way that non-baseball fans marvel that a card from a long-dead ballplayer can be worth tens of thousands of dollars, non-doll fans ask the same about Beanies.
As with baseball cards, Beanie Baby defects can pay off. “There’s a little yellow duck called Quackers,” Barlow says, “where a few of them went out without the wings being sewn on. It was just this little yellow body with its head down. It looks really pitiful. Forty-two hundred dollars, because it’s missing the wings.”
Barlow, who once had about 350 Beanies, now has a couple hundred. She began as a collector but soon became obsessed. “My husband thought I was absolutely nuts,” she says. “He said, ‘How could they ever be worth anything?’ He thought I was crazy until he came to one of my shows and saw that the place was packed.”
She then tells the story of a woman she met at a trade show. Her daughter had bought a Humphrey the Camel Beanie Baby for her daughter, but the doll was soon abandoned and ended up in a toy box. When it was unearthed some time later, its value had soared to $4,000. The family used it as seed money for the girl’s college education.
Not that Barlow’s tales take a back seat to anyone. Desirous of Seamore the Seal, Barlow once made a “buy” at 10 p.m. on a street corner. The seller didn’t want Barlow to know where she lived, so she told Barlow to meet her near South Coast Plaza. “She said, ‘You’ll see me with the flashlight,’ ” Barlow says. “She comes up to the window of my Explorer, turns on the flashlight, I look to see that [the seal] is in good condition, and I gave her the money.”
In real life, Barlow works for a Newport Beach manufacturing company. She does Beanie trade shows as a hobby and has both a telephone hotline and a Web site to keep patrons posted. Her next trade show, an all-day affair Sunday at the Country Side Inn in Costa Mesa, should draw hundreds, she says. Two more are scheduled for other sites in April.
I ask when the Beanie Baby bottom will fall out. “Last October, I thought it had to die,” Barlow says. Then, over Christmas, new dolls came out and the delirium continued. Now, she says, “I don’t see an end to it.”
With that, I pop the question.
What, I ask, should I do with the bear my sister gave me?
“My suggestion is you sell it,” she says, “but wait about three months. Then I think it’ll be $300 to $400.”
Can a person really put a price tag on sibling love?
I can.
So far, it’s $200 and rising.
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.
