Let’s talk for a second about Beanie Babies. If you aren’t an elder millennial, you might not recall just how much fervor surrounded these bean bags with heads on them back in the mid-1990s—but at their peak, they were all anyone talked about. McDonald’s eventually got in on the goldmine, releasing “Teenie Beanies” Happy Meal toys in 1997. Eager adults lined up around the block to score the collectibles, which everyone was sure would accrue value over time. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same thing is happening with McDonald’s Cactus Plant Flea Market Box right now: its ugly little four-eyed Happy Meal toys for adults are currently listed for hundreds of thousands of dollars on eBay. This should go without saying, but don’t pull out your credit card.
Cactus Plant Flea Market toys are not valuable
A quick refresher: McDonald’s Cactus Plant Flea Market Boxes—essentially adult Happy Meals containing a Big Mac or 10-piece McNugget meal at a price of roughly $12—rolled out last month with one of four figurines inside depicting classic McDonaldland characters Birdie, Grimace, and the Hamburglar, plus an original character named Cactus Buddy! (punctuation and all) dressed in McDonald’s gear. The toys have four eyes each, for some reason, and don’t do anything cool, like talk or light up or wind up or hold fries. They are purely collectibles, ones that McDonald’s apparently should have marketed directly to adults with disposable income a long time ago. The boxes sold out everywhere.
The hype surrounding these boxes is hardly surprising, given that it’s a product specifically geared toward hypebeasts. But now that you can’t snag one at your local drive-thru, the toys have popped up at bonkers prices on eBay, MarketWatch reports. While some vendors have listed the toys for the precious sum of $300,000, a stroll through the listings for Cactus Plant Flea Market toys on the online auction site really just demonstrates how arbitrary the market surrounding collectibles can be.
As we’ve pointed out before, just because a certain item is listed at an outlandish price on eBay, that doesn’t mean it’s a price that someone is willing to pay. Vendors lose nothing by shooting their shot, listing their item at a kingly sum and hoping that someone drunk or irresponsible enough will come along and buy it.
But the $300,000 listing can be disregarded for another reason: there are many aspects of this listing (see photo above) that imply it’s a harmless joke on the part of the seller. The way the price ends in .95, for example, and the fact that the toys are described as being both “vintage” and “rare,” neither of which is true—at least not yet. Furthermore, the product description ends with, “WILL SELL FAST!!!” and at that price, a quick sale would be downright worrisome. Well played, mysterious eBay vendor.
Joke listings aside, the Cactus Plant Flea Market figurines are currently listed for a wild assortment of prices across the platform. Here’s just a small sample, some of which have zero bids and some of which have been driven up in price by as many as 10 bids:
- 1 Cactus Buddy, $69.99
- 1 Hamburglar, $38
- 1 Grimace, $7,500
- 1 Cactus Buddy and 1 Grimace, $10,000
- 1 Grimace, 1 Hamburglar, and 1 Cactus Buddy, $37
- Full set, $56
- Full set, $88
- 4 used Cactus Plant Flea Market Boxes (no toys), $37
No matter how badly you want an adult Happy Meal toy right now, and no matter how much you’re willing to spend to get one, you likely will not see a return on that investment within your lifetime, in case that matters to you. The hype surrounding these toys is certainly manufactured, but not necessarily by scarcity, and the glut of four-eyed figurines currently entering the secondary market means that you can easily get one for a couple of bucks—or best offer—once the public eye has turned toward the next shiny thing. Like Boo Buckets, for example.