A strange pattern

[MC Morrado]

One thing I have noticed is that there is always a fad that causes people to buy something in a frenzy and sell them at super high prices to some collector. It's just people mindlessly buying stupid shit for the sake of buying stupid shit.

 

.... There were Cabbage Patch Kids, Garbage Pail Kids, Beanie Babies, Mighty Beanz, Funko Pops, Fidget Spinners, NFT's, Stanley Cups, some random piece of clothing that gets thrown away in like a week, and now those hideous looking plushies called "Labubus" or whatever they are.

 

This whole phenomena of people buying something en masse no matter how stupid or random (that I know of) just because it's popular that year or week before fading into obscurity is nothing new, it's been happening for literal decades. Collecting those things is perfectly fine for kids (let them have fun) but once you become an adult it looks pretty cringe.

Edited July 17, 2025 by MC.Morrado

[Millios]

18 minutes ago, MC.Morrado said:

Collecting those things is perfectly fine for kids (let them have fun) but once you become an adult it looks pretty cringe.

Who called the fun police

Let people have their collections be it figurines, comics, books, pieces of tech or anything else and spend their money on things they like 

 

Tho this

20 minutes ago, MC.Morrado said:

One thing I have noticed is that there is always a fad that causes people to buy something in a frenzy and sell them at super high prices to some collector.

Is called just scalping. Happens pretty much with ANYTHING that has even a small fanbase willing to spend money or just a product that sells like GPUs

Recently middle aged dudes were in stores buying 100s of dollars worth of pokemon cards to sell them for a profit. And you wanna guess who was the main audience for these cards were? Kids mostly. Basically taking candy from little kids and telling them "get more money and youll get it back" to 5-8 yo kids.

 

Ofcourse there was MAJOR backlash with people exposing them, getting into scaffles, trolling them with tactics like emptying their carts while they werent looking and scalpers complaining they were stuck with 10s to 100s of boxes and packs they couldnt get rid of and honestly fck the scalpers in this scenario especially cause they tried to scam lil kids

[Skipple]

It's supply and demand speculation. There really isn't much difference from an econ point of view between purchasing 100 Beanie Babies in 1997 vs purchasing crude oil option contracts. People purchase things with the anticipation that, in the future, demand will increase and supply will not keep up... resulting in a price increase. Get it correct, and you can sell at a later date and make a profit. 

 

All hail the equilibrium curve. The true master of our collective behavior.