Fads: Bankrupt By Beanie Babies

Remember the Beanie Babies craze of the late 1990s? Embedded below is an 8 minute documentary that a college student made detailing how, when he was a younger kid, his father became caught up in the mania and ultimately bought 15,000 or so Beanie Babies at the peak of the craze as an "investment."

At one point, the mother (who is clearly a little embittered) says of her husband, "it was always, 'oh, this is for their college education.' And I used to joke, 'what are they going to do, take a basket full of Beanie Babies into the admissions office?'..... Probably for about 6 months from when we started buying them, we were able to kinda realize that we could buy them and then turn around and make a profit on them. Although that was plan, it never happened because we never sold them, we just bought them. We missed that boat. "