For the past fifteen minutes I’ve been trying to pry four of the most corroded AA batteries I’ve ever seen out of Barney’s backside.
My wife and I have been renting and running a booth in a local toy mall for three years. Our booth’s inventory has three sources. My wife has been ordering new toys that look vintage, like new Slinkies, Slip-and-Slides, and chattering teeth that are all new, but look vintage. That stuff sells pretty well. The second source is my own toy collection. I’ve been collecting toys my whole life and have started letting some of them go.
The third source is from what they call “sourcing” — estate sales, thrift stores, garage sales, etc. The way I see it, it’s a win/win/win situation. My wife and I get to spend time together shopping and buying neat stuff we don’t need, we save a lot of this stuff from ending up in the dump, and we get to pass them along to fellow collectors. Occasionally we make a buck or two but for the most part if the toy booth pays for itself, we’re happy.
We’re still new to all of this and learning what sells and doesn’t sell. A lot of neat things sit in the booth for months until I eventually rotate them out. There’s a coffee mug shaped like Chewbacca’s head that’s been in the booth off and on for three years. It’s priced at $5. I thought it sell in a few days. Nobody likes Wookiee coffee apparently.
The opposite of that is also true. We sell a lot of items I have no nostalgic feelings for whatsoever. My wife sells a ton of My Little Ponies and Strawberry Shortcake dolls, but more interestingly she sells a lot of Tamagotchis and Teletubby keychains, because shoppers are getting younger.
Which explains why I am trying to save this Barney toy.
Out in my garage I’ve built a wall of shelves out of 2x4s designed to hold large storage tubs. Many of the tubs are full of toys while others contain things I no longer have a use or place for, but can’t bring myself to get rid of yet. There are tubs that contain old t-shirts that “might fit again someday”, old Halloween decorations, and at least 1,200 CDs.
The shelves were built to hold four tubs side by side and on the one closest to the garage door I have four with labels on them: Incoming, Toy Booth, Goodwill, and then a blank one. When we go shopping I throw the blank one in the back of the car. When I get home, that stuff gets moved to the Incoming tub; after it’s been cleaned and priced it goes to the Toy Booth tub, and stuff that’s broken or hasn’t sold ends up in the Goodwill tub.
Ironically, some of the things that end up in the Goodwill tub came from Goodwill.
So, back to this Barney. I hate Barney. Fortunately, my kids were born right when Barney was waxing and SpongeBob was waning. We only owned a couple of Barney DVDs and I’m pretty sure they all “got lost” at some point in time. There’s only so much an adult can take of that theme song.
Barney debuted in 1992 and was popular for over a decade, which means the people who grew up watching him are somewhere in their 30s, which is the generation after mine but a large section of the people visiting this toy store. The Battlestar Galactica jigsaw puzzle I found and put in the booth has lingered for months, while Barney-related items fly off the shelf.
Every toy that ends up in the Incoming tub has a history I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish each toy came with a registry that tracked who bought it and how many times it changed hands before I acquired it. The ones I wonder about most are things that end up in the Goodwill bins. These are toys that somebody bought new, ended up in Goodwill, and sat there until they were shipped away to the bins, the last stop before an unfortunate ending to their story. I can’t help but feel like I’m somehow saving things, even if they don’t deserve to be saved.
Such is the case with this Barney toy. This Magical Friend Barney has a tag on it from 2002, and based on the look of them, the four AA batteries in the battery compartment may have been the original ones. There are a few variables that determine how long an old AA battery will last before it begins to corrode and leak battery acid all over everything. For a cheap battery, it might only take a year or two. Better brands can last 5 or more years. No battery will last 30+ years, which is how old I assume these are. After a year or two batteries will slowly begin to leak and you’ll find corrosion in the battery compartment, mostly on the metal spring and contacts. Leave them too long and the acid acts like lava, oozing down into a toy’s innards and eventually destroying everything it rests on. Wiring can be repaired but it’s rarely worth the effort, and if the circuit board has been damaged then Barney will be joining the extinction list.
The main reason I’m trying to save this thing has nothing to do with money.
A couple of years ago I went to one of those “estate sales disguised as a garage sale.” An elderly woman had passed away and her family dragged half of her belongings out into her front yard and left the rest in the house. Nothing was priced. There’s little i hate more than haggling prices of things that belonged to someone’s recently deceased mother.
Out in the front yard were two large boxes of VHS tapes. I am always on the hunt for home-recorded VHS tapes contaiing local content (and more importantly, commercials), but honestly buying and selling official VHS tapes is a tough market. To be clear there are VHS tapes worth a lot of money, but they’re rarely ones dead grandmothers owned. Copies of Titanic are worth more as doorstops.
I got excited when I saw the box of VHS tapes but the enthusiasm drained when I saw it was a bunch of crud. A desperate family member zoomed over and said “I’ll make ya a deal,” which is code for “we don’t wanna haul that back in the house,” but I told them I was really looking for home-recordings.
Less than a minute later I was being whisked through a small dark house that smelled like mothballs and melted Werther's candy. A few minutes later I found myself loading literally hundreds of home-recorded VHS tapes into the back of my car. “We didn’t think anybody would want those,” they said. They even threw in the VCR. When I asked them how much they wanted for them, they said $20. I think I gave them $40.
The point is, someone’s trash is often someone else’s treasure. Every cool thing I’ve ever found at a garage sale was being sold because someone didn’t want it anymore.
To me, this Barney doll is trash. I don’t want a broken Barney doll and if it were making noise, I’d want it even less. But… in my head I can see some 30-something coming through the store, seeing it, and squealing. Maybe it was the one they had as a kid and maybe they want to buy it to put on a shelf or give it to their kid. God knows I made my kids play Atari 2600 games when they would have rather been playing the Wii.
The batteries are so corroded that they have become a part of Barney. With help from a screwdriver I’m able to pry them out and inserting new ones makes no difference. Logic tells me I should dump this thing in the trash, but I’ve got nothing better to do tonight.
Stupid nostalgia. I love you. You love me.
