Back in the 1990s, $5 Beanie Baby toys became a collector craze, leading to doomed investments once the appetite for them died. Now, another $5 toy is winning hearts – could things go the same way?
Today’s toy craze centers around $5 birds from Target. According to the store website, these plastic and polyester seasonal decorations are simply called “birds,” though they are also sometimes called “birbs” online.
“For those not terminally online, birb is affectionate internet-speak for birds,” per the National Audubon Society.
This week, Ann-Marie Alcántara of the Wall Street Journal took a deeper look at the growing Target birb craze. While it is hard to find them available in-store or even for delivery through the big box retailer, they can be found for much more than their original price (some are around $10 and others go for hundreds of dollars) on eBay.
“Every journalist has a white whale story that they want to write and share with everyone,” said Alcántara in an X post. “I finally wrote mine for today’s wsj a-hed!”
She explained that Target releases new models of the birds for most seasons. For example, birds dressed as bunnies or gnomes for spring as well as witch, bat and skeleton birds for Halloween. When those seasonal birbs drop, fans wake up at 3 a.m. ET to make sure they can get them.
There are Facebook groups and subreddits where people can discuss the birds. In the r/seasonalfabricbirds subreddit (for birds from other stores as well) someone even dropped a fan wiki page listing most of the drops. One poster in that thread from last year said they had only recently learned about the birds because of Target’s Pride collection.
NBC News reported that Target’s 2023 “Drag Queen Bird” was a viral hit last year and that hundreds posted about it on TikTok. This year’s Pride bird – an homage to Tippi Hedren’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film “The Birds” – was also a hit. BuzzFeed published a listicle of some of the best social media reactions to the bird, and a toy version of the Aston Martin Hedren drives in the film that accompanied it.
While NBC said the product description didn’t explain how the bird was related to queer culture, it also noted “The Birds” was once included on The Advocate magazine's list of “17 Horror Films Only LGBT People Understand” and that, like many of Hitchcock’s films, it addresses queer themes.
Enthusiasm for the birds has been compared to the craze for Ty’s Beanie Baby toys. These simple plush, bean-filled toys became so popular in the 1990s that some sold for thousands of dollars. According to Hitsory.com, some people even invested their life savings in rare releases.
However, the bubble burst in 1999, when the “company that developed Beanie Babies abruptly announced that it would stop producing the toys at the end of the year,” according to Slate. This quick rise and fall was covered in an HBO documentary and an Apple+ movie. Today, Ty does produce new items.
More recently, another Target item has inspired people to fight in stores and wait eagerly by their computers for product drops: Stanley cups. Audacy reported on the phenomenon this January, around the time of a Valentine’s Day product drop.
In an interview regarding the Beanie Baby fad, antiques expert Harry Rinker told MarketPlace that “for the first 30 years of anything’s life, all its value is speculative.”
So, birb fans should know that they’re likely shelling out on the items for pleasure rather than investment – at least for the next few decades.