In 1998, when I was in high school, my high school sometimes hosted community events, and students could work at them; we were usually paid in lunch and a pittance, but it looked good on college applications. One of these events was a Beanie Baby selling-and-trading expo, and I signed up to work it.
I didn't pay much attention to trends, and the school treated it as a standard retail expo. This was incorrect-- they should have been treating it as the Dutch tulip mania.
I have worked retail, fast food, and restaurant kitchen jobs since, and I have never had an afternoon of such pure chaos. I don't even know how to describe it. The school wound up buying the student workers dinner as well as lunch, as an apology, and several of the vendors gave us unsold stock, too, so I still have a couple of very cute slushies. It was a real lesson in just how overinvested people can get, and what behavior the public can wind up considering vaguely acceptable. So I am quite interested in the underlying causes of that experience!
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Date: 2021-02-02 10:31 pm (UTC)In 1998, when I was in high school, my high school sometimes hosted community events, and students could work at them; we were usually paid in lunch and a pittance, but it looked good on college applications. One of these events was a Beanie Baby selling-and-trading expo, and I signed up to work it.
I didn't pay much attention to trends, and the school treated it as a standard retail expo. This was incorrect-- they should have been treating it as the Dutch tulip mania.
I have worked retail, fast food, and restaurant kitchen jobs since, and I have never had an afternoon of such pure chaos. I don't even know how to describe it. The school wound up buying the student workers dinner as well as lunch, as an apology, and several of the vendors gave us unsold stock, too, so I still have a couple of very cute slushies. It was a real lesson in just how overinvested people can get, and what behavior the public can wind up considering vaguely acceptable. So I am quite interested in the underlying causes of that experience!