a friend move some items into a storage rental. The locker was open because some equally ridiculous Christmas crap was in the process of being added to that unit near his location where we were,
All the BB s were in little plastic drawers of plastic see through library file cabinets . Hundreds
My only thought :

where do they all come from? All the Beanie Babies, where do they all belong? (to the tune of Eleanor Rigby)

For some strange reason, I now realize the ones who were most excited about them are all Republicans.

she grew up very poor and then she retired and hunting for beanies was fun for her, and now I an donating them to various causes and they are doing good again.

You and your Mom are the best representatives of how to get the most out of a cute phenomenon. Beanie On!

he had Parkinson, and that became her life until he died in his mid 80's - she had a few years alone and after he died, she went to look for her best friend that she had gotten to busy to be with and found that her friend died, Then I made all the siblings take her on vacation with their families, but I was her day to day contact along with one of her sisters who was in a wheel chair, I was just glad she had some fun for the few years she had healthy before the stroke. I used to hunt down some for her because I became friendly with a Hallkmark employee, heh by work. We knew it was a fad, but it was amusing.
I all started with a neighbor's son, who thought it would make him rich, told him it wouldn't, told him about the bulbs in Holland. But his mother thought it would teach him about money, NOT.Mom thought the toys were cute, so I bought her one and it was like potato chips.
PS before i gave some away, I used to consign unusual ones to a retailer until the bubble broke, heh. The money went to the grandchildren's college fund.

edited to fix pronouns

babies from meetings where they decided they had to have a product that was collectable, $5, and something kids would beg their parents for at every outing. The last thing they decided on was that they would actually be juvenile stuffed animals. The product was the frenzy.

I was a college senior and had a long-distance girlfriend who was absolutely batshit about them...I remember the ones I bought her were $35 and $45 and I swear I visited EIGHT Atlanta-area malls one weekend trying to track them down (the highest-priced ones were $400!)

Baseball parks with shitty attendance realized that "Beanie Baby Day" was a surefire 100% guaranteed sellout, and I remember a few ugly incidents here and there with fistfights, adults stealing them from kids, etc

I'd collected baseball cards as a middle-high school student, and I remember very vividly when that market got over-inflated by speculators, then oversaturated and crashed...I had friends with albums full of $80-$100 cards that became $25 cards overnight, so of course I'd predicted the same thing happening to the Beanie Babies in a year or so...