Most commenters said she should donate them. Maybe to a children's home, or ask if the police or a hospital want them for emergency pickups, they can comfort a kid right? That's nice.
But some others said they must take this exciting collection to be appraised because these can be worth a TON OF MONEY, they sell for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars! This is a favorite urban legend of mine, probably because I was raising my eyebrows at beanie baby craziness when I was like 13. I feel like I knew even then that the fad wasn't worth waiting in line for, and it's still not.
Anyway it was just internet comments so I let it go.
HA HA NO I DIDN'T you guys know me, I went to ebay and sorted by auctions to see what they were really going for. Most popular price: not selling at all. If you sort beanie baby auctions by "ending soon" all you do is scroll through pages and pages of listings with zero bids. That's sad.
So I went to my computer for an advanced search to see the real story, because this is oddly fascinating to me and I don't have much else going on.
Here is the 2021 value of beanie babies, by the numbers:
Total beanie baby listings on ebay: 193,755
Total listed for auction: 25,922
Total auctions that have ANYONE bidding on them: 346
Total auctions that have NOBODY bidding on them: 25,576
Listings with two or more bids: 96
Listings with bids over $10: 50
Listings with bids over $100: 5
Highest priced: $585 for a snake named hissy that apparently has some weird color and a printing error on the tag. I could not for the life of me tell the difference at all between the one going for $585 and the seemingly identical ones going for $5, with the same weird color and the same space on the tag.
Beanie babies with a confirmed bid price "in the thousands": 0
The extremely rare "Princess Diana" purple beanie baby is a famous one. There are 6000 of them listed. Asking prices ranging from $3 to $970,000 - but these are not selling prices. People are willing to pay up to $50 if it's got some weird PVC pellets or was made in Indonesia instead of china or whatever, I haven't figured it out, but the vast majority aren't selling at all.
To conclude this adventure, I guess if you've got 500 beanie babies taking up space in your attic, there might be one in there worth more than $10.
But it costs $0.35 to list something on ebay. So if you list all 500 of them, you're out $175.
Darn.
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