A few days ago we brought you the collector’s wet dream fairy tale of how a very rare Princess Diana Beanie Baby was apparently worth $93,400 on eBay. Turns out that it was just that, a fairy tale.
In a report in the always reliable Daily Mail, a British couple bought a Beanie Baby at a yard sale for $15, but it was a special “first edition” Princess Diana bear and only 100 were made in 1997, a year after her death. They realized how rare the 1990’s relic was and put it for sale on eBay for a shitload of moolah.
Gawker did some investigating and discovered that the stuffed bear was not actually worth nearly $100,000. The oversensationalized stuffed animals are actually not really worth anything.
You can actually get the same special “first edition” Princess Diana Beanie Baby for as low as $15. One princess bear did sell for nearly $30,000, back in April, but it appears that it had nothing to do with the product, but more of a gullible dunderhead who apparently had $30,000 burning a hole in their pocket.
Tycollector.com, a site that specializes in providing information about values of Beanie Babies, which I have bookmarked and reference daily, issued a statement about Beaniegate:
In an irresponsible and non-professionally researched newspaper article on April 18, 2015, the UK Daily Mailand The Sun (UK) provided misleading information aboutPrincess Beanie Baby values. Once again, tycollector.com was inundated with emails from people in the UK and Ireland hopeful that their Princess Beanie Baby was worth a lot of money and asking for the best way to sell theirs.
The writer of the original article (as is usual with these types of articles) used “listing” prices on eBay, as opposed to the prices buyers have actually paid for Princess over the past 30 – 60 days, to support the premise that Princess is valuable. One cannot avoid speculation about the credibility of ANY article in the UKDaily Mail or The Sun, when those online magazines/newspapers permit such a misleading article as the one about the Princess Beanie Baby to be published.
You can list anything on eBay for $90,000. For instance, I can jack off into an old pair of Crocs and list it as $90,000 because that’s what I feel it is worth, but if no one buys my cummy Crocs for $90,000 then it isn’t actually worth $90,000, even though I really think they are a one-of-a-kind special edition collector’s item worth said $90,000.
So for all of you hooligans who read the original story, went to your nana’s house, knocked her unconscious while she was watching her stories, raided her attic of all her Beanie Babies, planned on selling them for $3,750,000 and buying a private island in the Caribbean, first off, you’re a terrible person, secondly, go check on your grandma and bring her flowers, and thirdly, you may have to devise a backup plan. I hear that there might be money in Pogs.
[Uproxx]