What Makes a Must-Have Christmas Toy?

get around a lot of those online fees. That's right. So we'd love to see you there. We have rubbed our stank all over that theater and we want your stank on that theater as well. Yep, we'll see you guys in January. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles if you choke, Brian over there there, Jerry over there,

and this is Stuff you Should Know. Early Christmas a dish. Yeah, we're kicking it off early like the rest of the retail world, do you, uh yeah? Man. This year you could find Halloween Thanksgiving and Christmas stuff in stores at the same time, like it was just the most normal thing in the world. But, um, you don't follow me on Twitter, and you should. I'm not on Twitter. Well that's what I'm saying. You should get on Twitter to

follow me. But at seven thirty in the morning on November one, the day after Halloween, I tweeted Merry Christmas. I got a lot of hate back for it. Yeah yeah, you people like that, Yeah, pretty much just troll I got. Yeah, well that was my plug for Twitter. Oh yeah, yeah, here we go. So, uh, let's see back, Chuck. You were twelve, okay, I was seven. Um, you didn't have a cabbage patch kid, did you. Well, there's just right there if you really want to know. I think you've

told it before, but let's have it. Well, we bought my sister one of the very first little people is what they were called before they were cabbage patch kids and Helen Georgia when they were handmade by Xavier Roberts, who I recently learned stole that idea from a woman and uh it took it as his own and made millions of dollars off of her idea. Yeah, I mean I wanted to maybe we'll do a short stuff about that.

I wanted to do a full length episode. But we I mean, we definitely talked about that because I think we have talked about like must have toys of the past, and and maybe last year's or the year before Christmas edition. Yeah, and we had she got this doll. Its name was Chuck Um, which was kind of funny because that's my name. And uh, it was a big deal. I think it was like the number seventy something or eighty something made and now it's worth a lot of money. Does she

still have it? Oh? That's great, Um. And we'll fish with Cabbage Patch Kids and then I'll take issue with you. So go ahead, Okay, I know what you're gonna take issue with. Oh I don't know if you do know, let me so, let me, let me. Let me start. So back in Cabbage Patch Kids were like the must have toy of the Christmas season, and from what I can tell, they were the first must have Christmas toy. Ever.

Now that's not to say there weren't extraordinarily popular toys at around Christmas time before Star Wars very famously offered their Early Birds Certificate package, which was basically an empty box that said, at some point in the future you will get Star Wars figures instead of this empty box. One of the great great marketing gems of all time. So that was a thing all the way back in two.

Mr potato Head was a hot toy that year. Robert the Robe was a hot toy in And when you say hot toys, it's tough to to overstate that like Robert the Robot had T shirts in the fifties. Didn't even know people wore T shirts in the fifties. He was in a movie. Um like that, there was there was, These were big deal toys. But my premise is this, this is my thesis. Okay, this is my own so

I'll take the hit if it's wrong. But that in just the same way that there were hit movies like The Godfather or like ben Her before Jaws came along, there wasn't such a thing as the summer blockbuster until Jaws came along and made the summer blockbuster a thing. There wasn't such a thing as the must have toy of Christmas until the Cabbage Patch Kid came along and made that a thing. Okay, so what issue are you going to take I can't take it any longer. You're

driving me crazy. Well, I don't think it was. I don't think it was Cabbage Patch. It's that was the must have toy, the first must have toy. That's what I take kiss you with the first Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm just speaking from my own life, Van, and I definitely think Star Wars counts because if you can sell an empty box to a kid for Christmas, then that that's pretty strong position as it must have thing.

And by the way, if you're listening, the reason they sold empty boxes is because they didn't know Star Wars was gonna be a big thing. So Kenner didn't have as many of these made in the run up to the film release pre Christmas. Uh so they got caught with their pants down and they realized that there was

a big demand, a huge demand. They sold like million, no million boxes, I'm trying to yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I don't know forty million Star Wars toys at that inside of a year, so okay, yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. And did you know that you can even buy these empty box kits on eBay? Now? Oh yeah, I'm sure that's all enlisted for Bucks. I'm not at all surprised. Uh. And then, just very quickly, I also want to point out that the biggest, most in demand

toy of my young life was the Atari pac Man cartridge. Boy, that's sold seven million cartridges. Okay, great, Great, the numbers don't lie. That's a big, big number, seven million, forty million. You can toss big numbers out all day long. But let me ask you this. For that empty box of Star Wars for the Atari pac Man cartridge, did a woman have her leg broken because the crowd trying to

get their hands on those things turned violent? Or before you answer, in addition to that, did a department store manager in Charleston, West Virginia have to arm himself with the baseball bat to defend himself from his very customers who are trying to get to the Star Wars empty box or the Atari cartridge? I would guess that the answers no, Well, I think human behaviors have changed over the years. I don't know. Three well, I guarantee I

could find one violent incident about the Atari cartridge. I'll bet you couldn't. Well, you know there wasn't then, because there was they met the demand. Okay, so that's a big part of it too, right, So there have been well let's just move on from this the cabbage Patch cabbage Patch kids if not worthy first, which they were? Did you have Yeah? Yeah, Webberdno, you had a cabbage Patch kid. Yeah. I ended up taking his head off

and giving him a mohawk as I grew older. But because not to be too like gender binary here, but I didn't know a lot of boys that wanted the cabbage Patch kid. What I've I've always broken the mold chuck. Well, sure, no, I mean there's nothing wrong with it. I grew up with William wants a doll on free to bu and me, so I get it. But that's why I just don't know. I think it must have Christmas toy would be one that everybody wants. Yeah, as far as I knew, everybody

wanted a cabbage Patch kid. We'll just put this one to bed, like a cabbage Patch kid with a mohawk. Yeah. So, um right, well that was a big thing. Like there was there was some hallmarks to the idea of a must have toy that were surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids. Violence is one, Um, there was a lot of buzz that was picked up by the media, and one of the ways that that was generated was by UM, I think Coliko, who owned cabbage Patch Kids at the time, sent these

dolls directly to reporters. That was a big one. UM and the fact that there was not enough supply to meet the demand. These things kind of came together to make Cabbage Patch Kids and must have Christmas toy and this has been carried on as a tradition ever since then,

ever since that very very first time with Cabbage Patch Kids. Uh. There were Nintendos that dominated back in eight uh and three years in a row, Nintendo had three different products that were like the must have Christmas toy, UM, that first game console huge, the Game Boy Huger it felt like uh, and then of course possibly the best game gaming system of all time if you look at just relative to the time, the Super Nintendo Console. I don't know, man in sixty four was pretty great with Golden Eye.

Oh God in sixty four was great. Yeah with gold and I I mean like it would have been, you know, fine on its own, but the fact that Golden Eye existed was the thing that made in sixty four to me that game blew my mind. Um. Yeah it was great, especially the Battle Royal where you could play your friends. Oh man, that was finn. Yeah, we called it Hunt

and Chase. Yeah. I used to get so mad in those like that's the only time I ever got mad playing video games because I don't do that thing where you play online and you can you know, you can exact revenge on people. So I did not take it well when my friends stock behind me and shot me in the head. Right, Yeah, that was always a bummer. What about Tickle Myoma? That was a big one, thanks to Rosie O'Donnell. That was a little old for that. Oh really, that was in my mid twenties. I had one.

Oh yeah, well you were high school, not really, yeah, this was this is post high school even. But this was such a craze that there was that um characteristic violence where a Walmart employee was trampled while he was trying to restock the display um late at night, I believe. But he had a pulled hamstring, injuries to his back, his jaws, knee broken, rib, a concussion, um. And it continues on like I haven't read about any violence from hatch a Moles, but from two thousand and sixteen to

two eighteen. They were the if not one of the top um must have Toys of the year, and so hatcher molesw come because you have to put it in a dish or a bowl that you eat out of, and you have to leave it there and leave it there and leave it there, and then it hatches into a garbage toy. Oh. So my experience is that it's they're they're pretty, They're good. Oh yeah, yeah, so you you like your hatch the mole? Yeah? Are you talking? Is it like animatronic? Huh? Is it animatronic? I'm talking

about hatch the moles. Yeah, it's it's so okay. So I don't know anything about the dish. I just my experiences from my niece, and I don't remember any dish. Oh wait, this isn't the Are we talking about two different things. This is the thing you put in water. No, no, no, electrocute yourself when you touch it. Okay, maybe I'm thinking about some melts. This is like an animatronic thing that hatches from an egg, but like you have to like teach it and train it and raise it and give

it attention everything. It's a bit like the tamagochi but like an animatronic pet. Oh, I got you now, I'm thinking of the thing that you It's an egg that you put in water and after a few days it hatches into a garbage toy. Yeah, no, that's that's not

the hatch moles are much different. So so there's this tradition of them must have Christmas toy um and you can find all you want about them every year because they're everywhere all the time, and the media reports on this kind of stuff, and they're on TV, and there's ads, and there's like social media stuff. Now, but there's like a really big question that doesn't have a lot of press associated with it, and certainly no studies or anything that I could find. But there's a question, Chuck, like,

how does a toy become a must have Christmas toy? Well, let's take a break and look get to the bottom of it. Right after this, that was quite a set up, I think. So. So back in the day when you were shopping for Christmas, if you were a kid or a parent, it didn't matter do you knew exactly what to do, you knew exactly how to do it. There was no no frills, no nothing. It was all just holiday joy and the goodness of the Christmas holiday season.

That's right, That is correct. And you learned what you wanted if you were a kid from two things. Saturday Morning cartoon commercials and uh, whatever your catalog was. The Seer's wish Book is certainly one service. Merchandise catalog was another big one for us. Yeah, there's a Montgomery Awards catalog. Yeah, of course. And um you put this together and you introduced me to a website called wish book Web that might as well be called um time suck dot com.

Yeah it's pretty great, isn't that because someone has gone through and scan end Uh is it just year's wish books? No, No, it's Sears J. C. Penny and Montgomery Ward. And then I think there's the occasional what store is that here there? Right? They have scanned these entire wish books up to nine, which, from everyone knows, is the cutoff date for nostalgia. That's right, from the earliest days of nineteen thirty three. And boy, let me tell you, dude, and I know you know

this because you've done it. If you go through and spend a few minutes clicking through these things, in the years where you were like six to twelve waves of nostalgia, nostalgia wash over you, like like John Hodgeman would succumb to these waves. Yeah, I know, it's amazing. I remember some specific pictures. I remembered the I mean the NFL section alone brought tears to my eyes and I forgot how much they hyped football back then. You just can't

stop crying. It was crazy that the clothes, the alarm clocks, the clock radios, the the tech section. Um, it was just it was off the charts for me looking through this. I almost did nothing else today. Yeah, I know it is. Wish book Web is pretty awesome. Like somebody went through and scanned every single page of these several hundred pages each catalog's for decades worth of catalogs. It is. It

is God's work. And just to get laughs by like seeing the the two four year olds posing in bathrobes, like it's really really funny, right, well, it's got like a pipe that blows up. God. This is just amazing. What a great website. So so wish book Web is kind of preserved how you used to figure out what you wanted for Christmas, which was you go through these wish books or these catalogs or whatever, and then you tell your parents you dog ear them, maybe drop some hints.

It was the correct way. Century has a kind of an updated version of that, but it's still kind of follows this same general contours right where there are lists still and like catalogs, but now it's not just department stores that have like the market cornered on them. Like that's actually kind of gone away. It's very tough to find a department store catalog. I believe Myers still does that.

I think they're kind of like a Midwestern Target. Yeah, and they have a toy catalog that they put out still, I believe to this year. Well now if you get the Restoration Hardware right or Ikea, but the But there's lists everywhere, and it seems like every retailer has one or all the major retailers have one, and depending on where it's coming from, it's some are more trustworthy or above the boards or or objective than others when saying like these are the must have toys, Like, I'm on

one end of the spectrum. You have um like third party websites and publications and organizations like the Spruce or Toy Insider or Toys Tots, Pets and more, and they actually evaluate the toys when they make their lists. Yeah, I mean these it's just different now. And I don't think it's nostalgia like thinking things were better back then,

but it was. It seemed easier and better to let a kid sift through a catalog and pick out stuff than I guess what are you supposed to do today, like sit down with your kid at one of these websites and at look at the top twenty hot toys and say what do you want? Like, I don't. I don't know how it works these days. I don't know. Maybe instead of like dog earing the pages, you send

your parents links. I'm sure you do, actually you know, yeah, But I mean if your kids are too young to be on the internet, I'm not sure how to do it. Because I could hand my four year old catalog and say pick out some stuff would be great, But I'm not gonna say, hey, just log onto the spruce and go uh scroll down and see you find something you like? Stay out of their parents section. What do I mean? What do you do? You have? You literally have a kid, chuck,

what do you do? I don't know, I mean we buy, we just buy things that we think she might like. Um, so there's like a whole world out there of like lists and websites that showed toys and stuff that she's unaware of. Oh wow, she's got a big surprise ahead of her. So that's great. I'm excited for her. Actually yeah, but I mean you definitely feel like you're sort of stabbing in the dark. Let's do like I mean, a parent can go through and look at those lists, but

you know, kill me. Well, a lot of people are excited about that kind of thing. They're like, good, this is Yeah. I don't have to like go to the store and stand there and be like what are we getting here? You could go to some website or USA Today or the Today Show or whoever is partnering with some of these trusted sites like Toys, Tots, Pets and More or Toy Insider, and like they kind of take

a lot to the guesswork out of you. They're basically saying, these are what experts are saying your kid is going to want. If you go by this, you will score a home run with your kid. Yeah. I think my problem is I don't know what has bought and what is real reviews because as you have dug up and I didn't even know this, of course they do this. Um, if you go on Amazon, they you know, you can spend two million bucks as a retailer to be on there,

you know, on their top list or whatever. So okay, yes, And what I saw though, was that they you spend that money to nominate them to nominate your toy for their consideration to include on the West for a nomination. I don't know how the process works, but yeah, I saw. I saw like the headline say you pay two million for a slot, but if you read the finer print and saying you pay two million for them to even consider it, and then I guess I don't know how

they curated. They actually kind of keep a close lid on it. But it generated like a hundred and twenty million dollars in revenue for Amazon just to be on their list of hot toys for the year. Walmart they charged ten grand a month per toy to be on their Buyer's Picks toy list. And uh, like you point out here, they Walmart starts their list in August, and you've got to wonder, is that because they're making tin grand of pop right off of all of the stuff

per month. Yeah. Yeah, they released There's in late August, before Labor Day even and like this isn't like, hey, we think these toys are going to be hot this year. It's here's the hot list of holiday toys, and Target

released There's at the beginning of September. Um. I think Bull's Eye is the name of their mascot dog mascot spuzz Mackenzie basically, And I couldn't see if they charge for placement or how they compile it or anything like that, which actually makes me suspect that they don't, because there's plenty of ink about Amazon and Walmart's lists and how they charge for him, and the fact that there's not one for Target makes me think either they're really keeping

a lid on it or um, they actually don't charge for that. But so there's there's kind of two lists where if you're a parent you need to ask, Yeah, you need to ask dogs and dog people and cat people. You need to ask, where is this list coming from? And if it's coming from a third party site, go look up the third party site and they will tell you. And they're like about us section, how they determine what toys or what and if you really want to get

that information, that's fine. But even if Amazon or Walmart or even if Target charges for placement on their lists, just the very fact that those things are on their list is going to make them among the hot toys of the season. So it's like a self fulfilling or self paying prophecy. Yeah, I mean, I guess anytime you look up something on a major retailer website, those first

few things are sponsored and they say sponsored in little letters. Oh, sometimes they don't really, Yeah, I mean sometimes it's kind of hard to discern, uh, whether or not you're looking at the real top thing or the sponsored thing, right, And I think, like with the Giftless in particular, I don't believe that they say that these are sponsored. I think it's just like here's the hot lists according to Amazon. Well, let's talk a bit about marketing in general around the holidays.

Um that you know, it's a it's a science in a way, and they have found out through science that um, happy people buy more. Uh you are not everyone's happy around the holidays, but they definitely as marketers, play on the idea that you are happier around the holidays, and so you should be in the buying spirit. Uh, definitely when you're talking about kids, that is the case. They

pummel children with ads. There was one study here the University of Hertfordshire counted one hundred ads and a three hour Saturday morning kids uh slot Christmas hundred in a three hour slot. That's a lot of ads, it is um. And then of course, you know children are on more than one screen these days, so they're also getting ads on you know, when they're watching YouTube or whatever, um,

or just on kids websites. There's ads everywhere. I can't remember what episode we really kind of dove into that advertising man, I think it was about advertising for children,

like that was the sole goal. So so the idea is that just just the holiday season itself puts most of us in a pretty good mood, and advertisers say, oh, well, if we release ads that are holiday themed, will be able to kind of tap into that good will and good mood and um, make you nostalgic or or feel good about things and so um by doing that, we'll be able to kind of tie our our brand or

our product to that holiday. Um, that holiday sensation and you'll say, oh, I do want to go by that because it makes me think of being a kid at Christmas time. That's really a six stuff. Um, I mean like that's everywhere. You can't get away from that in the holiday season. And there's not even necessarily anything wrong with it. It's just that's just basic marketing and advertising

one on one when it comes to holiday advertising. Yeah, and the other thing we mentioned earlier in terms of marketing, and this is also marketing one on one, is about scarcity. Right. If you have a toy that there's a limited amount of, that is when you're gonna find people trampling each other to get there, because people are motivated by fear. And if you know that a toy is a must have and there aren't many of them and they're going on sale at a certain time, it is frightening what a parent,

some parents might do to secure that toy. Yes, so this is finally we've reached the key ingredient. Right, You've got lists of toys that are promoted and advertising and maybe even show up with their own articles in the media. Then you have the fact that we're already kind of primed to to buy because it's the Aliday season. We're in a good mood. But when you add that scarcity marketing,

it ramps it up to a totally different level. And when you have a must have toy that is hard to find, like you said, people will do very crazy, violent, mean stuff to get it. And there's a lot of reasons why even if you're not willing to like throw an elbow to get a toy, you might still be willing to camp out at four am waiting for you know, a twenty four hour retailer to restock UM their their

supply of this so you can buy it. That's unusual behavior and the reason why it all comes down to scarcity marketing and the idea that we have a fear of missing out, a fear of social embarrassment, of fear of our kids not loving us as much as they could had we gotten them this toy, and that all of these things, the scarcity marketing is the real driver that kind of hyper charges must have toy frenzy. Yeah, and it's not you know, just toys. You've seen everything

from UM. You make a great point about Peppi Van Winkle whiskey. Oh, I should say that's from marketing Land. A guy named Jacob bods Gud wrote an article on marketing Land where he cited that and the Disney Vault is really good examples. Yeah, Disney Vault, it's another great one. Um. They were very famous for not just saying like here's all the movies we've ever made that you can buy on VHS, all on one big package. They would release them every every now and then, and you know, you

had a limited time to get them. And I wasn't really hipped all this, but my dad and his wife were way into the Disney stuff, and you know, they were adamant about making sure they filled out the entire collection and really kept up with when they were going to be released. And what a big deal that was. Yeah,

that was a big one. And um Bod's Guard makes the point like by making them limited and available also only for a limited time, with years sometimes a decade in between times when you can buy these things, it creates this like frenzy to go buy them, and it also makes them like a treasured part of that person's home,

you know what I mean. Yeah, And you can also fake out the public a little bit and mislead them on the scarcity like you might have a lot of the stuff and just kind of lead the public to believe like now you better go get one right now because they may not be around next week. Yeah. The people who made Hatch a Moles spin Master, Um, Hatch the Moles were really hard to find and I think two thousands, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen UM, and spin Master

was basically accused of purposefully using scarcity marketing. And for their part, they said, hey, we were totally caught off guard three years in a row by the um you know the popularity of Hatch the Moles, and other people were like, that's that's b s. You can totally ramp up production pretty fast. Um. Another must have toy was finger links. Remember them from like last year or the year before. They were like little monkeys or slaw or dragons or whatever that would hang on to your finger.

And they were little finger sized robots that would like blink and blow kisses and do all sorts of cute stuff. They weren't they were cute instead of uncanny because they weren't the words finger sized robots together so right, they would cut your throat while you slept. Um, But they they were they were caught unaware. Even though they really tried it hard to make them hit through social media, they were still surprised when it actually happened. But they

ramped up production. They brought a third factory in China online. They went from shipping via cargo boat to air transport to get supplies here faster, and they were able to ramp up and and meet demand pretty quickly. So the idea that Hatch themill just couldn't possibly do that really smelled to a lot of people like they were purposefully using scarcity marketing. Yeah. Scarcity, I mean, it's an interesting

concept because you see it everywhere. You know, they have restaurants that, you know, here in Atlanta, Home and Finch had the Holm and Burger that like one day a week, like we'll sell a hundred of them starting at ten pm on this night, and then everyone's like, oh my god, what is in that burger? People would line up the block. Yeah. Or this is a nice little tidbit here that you dug up about supermarket experiments. Yeah, that's from an article

from market Watch by Mark Elwood on that one. It's amazing. Even putting up a sign for soup that says limit twelve per person will make people be like, oh, I should I should probably buy twelve of these for whatever reason. Campbells might they might stop making their chicken noodle soup right or in this case, it was soup that was on sale, so who knows what the price is going to go back to? You know, well, that's true. So um. One of the other things that scarcity produces is this

idea that there haves and have nots. Right, So if the idea that you're fearful of missing out or fearful of your kid not loving you isn't enough, there's a whole other, um cognitive bias of of being a have not, of being left on the cold, which I guess is

a fear of missing out. But there's also the benefit of being a have where if you're talking about like a finger link, which is a fifteen dollar toy, but people were crazy for those things that either last year or the year before, and like just about anybody can afford this fifteen dollar toy. So even if you're like I have not throughout the year, you're down on your luck, maybe you're unemployed or you're unemployed, Um, things just aren't

going your way. You could still camp out and wait for that late night restocking of finger links and get your kid that toy, and for that time you are a have and maybe even somebody with a much higher social status than you couldn't get that finger link, which makes it all the more sweet. And then let's also not forget. Like we said, this is during the holiday season, so emotions like count extra So to be a have when you're normally not during the holiday season because you

gotta must have toy is exponentially increased. Yeah, it's a big deal, um, because it's it. Even if it's just emotionally equal for a brief period of time, it's it can be a big deal for somebody. Um, I'd say we take our final break here here, and then we come back and talk about the worst people toy flippers right after this. All right, so I set up the worst people are toy flippers. Obviously there's a lot of really,

really bad people in the world. And I'm being what hyperbolic, but I do think somewhat the idea of buying targeting and buying a lot of must have toys to sell later for profit on eBay makes you a pretty rotten person. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and lay that judgment down some people do. I reserve judgment for the ones who do it professionally. I think if you are a person who is just trying to augment your um, your own like holiday expenses and uh you are foreseeing a lack of

supply ahead of time, I say more power to you. Yeah, I'm not into it. I feel the same way about ticket scalpers. Yeah, it's exactly. I mean it's the same thing basically. Yeah, it's it's buying up a bunch of things. Uh. Sometimes and this is completely gross and awful. Using bots. Yeah, that's the pits to especially for concert tickets, like when bots buy up all the best concert tickets, especially our tickets. Yeah, exactly,

I think anybody uses bots on ours? Well probably not, but um, actually, stuff you should know is is we've seen very few bad examples of people trying to overcharge for a sold out show. More times than not, it's a fellow listener that's like, hey, just come along, you can sit next to me for face value, or I don't even give it to you. Yeah, that happens quite a bit. And yeah, I mean there's only been a couple where somebody's like, you know, a million dollars and

of course they didn't sell it now. Um, but yeah, we haven't run into that. Mostly the problem is from um ticket outlets just charging ridiculous fees on top of our ticket price. Well that makes us mad, and you all should know we don't have control over that. Um. We're the Eddie Vetter of podcasting, right. But if you ever find yourself in a situation where you got shut out of the stuff, you should know show and your option is to not go or to pay like a

ridiculous amount, just send us an email. Will put you on the list. Oh god, Chuck, Wow, you just opened some floodgates. I mean, there's a very few list spots, so it's not like you know right now you just started a must have toy frenzy for the list. Look what you've done. Oh let's get back to bots. Um. These bots are so savvy that they can they can buy out, they can have hundreds of credit card numbers on file because sometimes they'll have like a limit to

how many things you can buy. They are all these shortcuts in ways to bypass all of these safeguards put into effect, including captures. They will hire foreign workers to sit around and type in the captions to get through security. Which I mean, if there is anything that says holiday spirit more than that, I can't think of it. But these bots can, uh can sometimes buy out something in the second that it goes up online for regular human to say, oh, like, all right, they've released the tickets

or the doll m right, because they they'll see. What they'll do is they'll go on to like retail websites and figure out what the unique idea is for the

product that they're looking for. It'll start right, it'll start monitoring that page because people who build these pages will put them out and just won't you know, kind of really open the curtain for hours ahead of time, so the body will have the page targeted and just keep refreshing it hundreds of times a second until that sale goes live, and they will have ordered scores of these things or dozens or hundreds whatever however many it can

before you can even if you're sitting there refreshing your browser, between the time it takes to refresh your page, they will have wiped the place out using these bots. And then if you're truly sophisticated, you probably have another set of bots who take your inventory and then put it up for sale at some exorbitant price on Amazon or eBay or craig List or something like that. Yeah, the worst people. So like, you don't even have to do anything,

you just stick your bots on it. Yeah. I stand by it, even for the enterprising person who I just I don't know. I don't have a have a big problem with someone making money off of someone else's misfortune to not have been able to get that themselves. I don't think it makes someone scrappy or enterprising at all. Hey man, that's that's fine. Yeah, I'll die on this hill. Okay, that's fine. So if you are one of those people that Chuck hates and you want to be enterprising, there

is a article written by Lisa Smith. It's on Investipedia and it's called the Guide to reselling toys at Christmas for extra money, which is very innocuous. Um. Then there's some tips actually that make a lot of sense. If you want to do this, do you want to go over them or you're gonna remain mute? You can go over so you could talk to parents if you wanted to write Chuck, that's right, Josh good idea. Um there, because they know what kids want. You can talk to

kids themselves, which makes sense. I mean, just go right to the horse's mouth. I've already said the same thing, Joshua. Um, you can talk to Santa. I thought this was pretty enterprising. Like imagine if you are trying So what you're trying to do here is to identify what toy you want to buy as early ahead of time as possible, so that, um, you can have identified the hot season, the hot toy of the season, and bought them before the demand really struck.

So you talked to mall, Santa's hang out in stores, you can talk to cashier's stock people, all that stuff, because not only will they know what toy you need to look out for, they'll know when these new supplies are coming in. Maybe slip on a Starbucks card or something like that with ten Bucks on it as a thank you, but be sure to deduct that from your bottom line. Deduct that bribery, right, and then um, you

can actually hang out in chat rooms. There's entire websites that are dedicated to this kind of stuff that are um you know that that say like, here's the toys we're looking for or I spotted some at this you know, Walmart or whatever. This this stock guy said that Walmart replenish his own on Thursdays at ten. Um. There's a lot of stuff you can do if you really wanted to put the leg work in great or you could put all that energy into doing something worthwhile. Right, I

know what you're talking about. This is the like the Michael Larson approach to the holidays, the man who got no whammy's on pressure. Luck. Oh, I had no problem with him. Okay, this is virtually the same thing. It's somebody Michael Larson wasn't. Uh, there wasn't some father who didn't have much money that you know, overpaid for a doll to make his little girl happy at Christmas time. Michael Larson didn't do that, right, Uh, he would have, though,

I'm sure of it. Oh goodness. So that's what you can do if you want to flip toys and ruin the holidays. As far as Chuck's concerns, um and that is that is a big part of the competition of people who will go buy out stocks like you're not really facing them nationwide unless you're talking about people who release bots onto websites or whatever. But they are out

there and they do. They do actually create competition and help drive that frenzy even further, because remember what's behind must have toys a scarcity marketing, and if there are people out there actively contributing to the scarcity, that's a big deal. Here's what I want to hear from. I want to hear from, uh some women listeners who let's say you go on a on a on a date from a dating app and you sit down across from

your date and you're like, what do you do? And he goes, I'm a toy flipper, and she like, what's that? Because you know, around Christmas time, I go out and buy like tons of toys that I know little kids really really want, and then I'll mark them up so I can make a lot of money off their parents who may not be able to afford it. Right, and just tell me how that date goes from there? Yeah? Can it? Does it have to be a man and a woman? Can it just be anybody? It can be anybody?

But you know, I think the guy that does this is the guy that I just did that voice for, who's apparently from Jersey. They're all from New Jersey. Okay, So, um, I feel like we've learned a lot here. We've talked about, you know, how a toy becomes a must have toy of a season usually has to do with some sort of some combination of of advertising and buzz marketing as

long or as well as um scarcity the flippers get involved. Um, I think, and I want to back this up, Chuck, there's not a lot of stuff out there on this. This all had to be brought together. This is kind of one of those rare stuff you should know THESS about what makes must have toy must have toy. But I think it's I think it holds up. Should we talk about some of the big toys of this year? Yes, So those lists that are out there, this helps me. Actually we put a bunch of well that's the point.

That's we're trying to help you and all of the toy flippers out there. So actually this is for all the parents. This will help you get a drop on the toy flippers, because I guarantee there are very few toy flippers listening to stuff you should know now because we have good people in our audience, so that all those lists that are out there now we kind of compiled and cross referenced them. A number of them lists

from Target, Toys, toughts, pets, and more. That's just one Amazon, the Today's Show, Toy Insider, the Spruce Crazy Coupon Lady who had a post about toy flipping, Walmart, and New York Magazine. All those lists we looked at and we found ones that appeared on at least a couple, if not more, And one of them, the first one, appeared on basically every single list that we saw. Yeah, this one, the balloom doll b l U m E. Nothing to do with the rest of development, but it is this

is something and that that my daughter might like. Apparently this is another another thing you add water to uh and it blooms. But this is I don't think it hatches from an egg. I think this doll just like grows like a chia pet mite kind of, and like the hair that grows is I can't tell. It looks like some sort of foam or styrofoam or something, but it takes different shapes like pineapples or cakes or something

like that. And there's I think twenty two different versions. Yeah, yeah, but they're also yeah, they're super affordable too, so they're they're probably going to be the hot must have Christmas toy of the Year's bloom Dolls Hatch the Moles are still around. Yeah, and there's one that's um from How to Train Your Dragon Toothless Dragon, the Baby Dragon. They have a Hatch the Mole version of him. What else

really Barbies on the list? Yeah, Barbie has a dream Plane, which I saw in a couple of lists where um, yeah, it's a for Barbie. There's like a snack cart and everything comes with a dog that I guess lives on the plane. There's also l O L Surprise? Have you heard of that? I hadn't heard of it either until we started researching this, But they're like a whole brand um and a lot of these, including bloom Dolls in l O L Surprise, they tap into like this whole

trend of unboxing. Do you remember when we talked about unboxing on YouTube where like people open toys because our good friend, uh Joe Randazzo did his Lego Man unboxing videos that were still to me one of the funniest

things I've ever seen. Yes, great plug by the way, but they still do that, like they're still unboxing is a huge trend and that's worked its way into toys, so L O L Surprise is kind of based on that, and there's like a whole line of dolls but they're like into like DJ stuff and fashion and all that, but they also have Surprise. And there's also a kid named Ryan's World. I don't think that's his last name, but that's his his YouTube channel and guarantee we talked

about Ryan's World in that Unboxing Toys episode. But um, he's got all sorts of toys that are um out where you like, you just don't know what you're getting when you open the thing. It's just surprise unboxing the weird sub genre on YouTube of unboxing or I remember we talked about the one where the lady's hands would just play with things. Yeah, it was the Yeah remember she was like pepper Peg. Yeah, it's so interesting. Uh, I'll tell you the one on the list though that

I like that. Um, I usually look at the toys that I'm like, what, I like to play this with my daughter, because that's important. I can't be bored out of my mind, you know. Oh yeah, good point. Uh. And this lego make your own movie kit looks pretty cool to me. Yeah. I was kind of hartened to see that on on a couple of lists, you know, because it's like, this is about motion movies you can make. Yeah,

it's thoughtful, it's inventive. Yeah, where it's it's yeah, there's They have a bunch of different stages and backgrounds and props, including a banana. It's great. So you learn how to make. Are you gonna get get her? That? I think you should anytime? Buddy? Can we make a flaming hoop out of a coat hanger and do things with that too? Okay? Um? And then the other one was the Fisher Price link A moles, which are super cute, including the smooth move sloth.

Hey I'm down with Fisher Price yea, so huge, huge right now? Yeah? Do you remember Playmobile? Play Mobile? Remember that they were like the vaguely European kind of um action people, but there was nothing like violent or military about them. They would explore or um. I probably recognize them. I definitely know that name. You You've seen it a million times. Right when you see it, you I'll I'll look it up and show it to you later. But it's you'll see it and be like, yeah, of course, wait,

I see him right there. Sure, yeah, there you go. Yeah. I was kind of a Fisher Price kid. But you know, we still have some of that stuff that our daughter plays with that we had when we were kids, like the barn and the boat, and you know, it holds up, definitely does hold up. You got anything else, nothing else? You're gonna go buy a bunch of toys and flip them. I got nothing else except for twenty tho hatch homles

in my garage. Man. Here's the other thing, though, Chuck, like, you're taking a risk because you've got to predict what they must have toys. And if you if you guess wrong, you've got twenty thousand hatch moles that nobody wants. But I'd love to see that happen in real life. I guarantee it happened. So just keep an ear out, Uh, if you want to know more about the must have toys. There's basically nothing you can't know that we haven't already told you. So just I guess, go get your your

kids some Christmas toys. That's right? Is that a good way to sign off? That's great? Okay? Since I said, uh, is this a good way to sign off. It's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this from a teacher. We always like to shout out our teachers and their their students. Hey, guys, just sending one of what I'm sure is among infinite thank you so that you receive as a teacher who regularly references knowledge I gained from listening to your show in my class. My students, unwittingly, Uh,

and I are eternally grateful for your work. They give a hearty laugh whenever I steal your characters. Took Took the wise proto Homo sapien and erg the folly prone genetic defect to elucidate points about the evolution of early humans. I knew you wouldn't mind my poaching that you think, John, you'll be hearing from our lawyers. John, you're the toy

flipper of teachers. Just kidding, Uh. The reason I'm writing is to say I think you should not be discouraged by any listener mail you received telling you to keep

your opinions to yourself. My favorite episodes are the ones where either or both of you have so strong feelings about the subject that you can't help but go on a rant Maybe it's just because I agree with every rant, but I feel like it is important to take a stand on issues that matter to you and admit that you're human beings with a real stake in the game. Thanks again, I'll keep listening as long as you keep podcasting. That is from John L. Bushkin. So thank you, Mr. Lebushkin,

and hello to uh your students. Mr Lebushkin's class. Yeah, hi, guys, you's got a cool teacher. Yeah, he does sound pretty cool. He's doing God's work, teaching the next generation. That's right. I hope he doesn't work in a public school because he's gonna be like, can't say God's work. If you want to get in touch with us like Mr Lebushkin did, or if you're a toy flipper who has an argument

against Chuck's argument, we want to hear from you. Bring You can go on to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our social links, and you can also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows h