Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Ho uh-oh — Watch the Furby fly

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Dec. 22, 1998 | 10:38 a.m.

This is a tale of Christmas shopping, which is to say it's a tale of madness and greed; a tale of people wantonly abandoning commonly held principles of good behavior; a tale of the one class of people we routinely exempt from our holiday cheer, the retail worker; but mostly it's a tale of the overpowering hold exerted on otherwise decent human beings by a stupid hairy toy.

It involves a nice woman named Lynn (not her real name), a seasonal worker at Famous Toy Store (not its real name). On the day in question, Lynn was caretaker of that most valuable of commodities, a stash of Furbies. Two cases of them underneath the counter of her customer-service booth, to be handed out as people asked for them. She hoped no one would ask.

As you know, Furbies are this year's Cabbage Patch Kids and Tickle Me Elmo, which means they might as well be made of solid gold components and spout can't-miss investment tips, judging from the behavior they inspire.

Lynn's adventure stared with one customer who must have spied the boxes. "He had a smile on his face," Lynn recalls. "He said, 'You have any Furbies?' I really didn't even want to hand it to him." She knew what would happen; a Furby in the open is an idiot magnet. "Everyone at the cash register started picking up on it. By the time I handed out the third one, people coming in the door saw them, too."

And then?

"Then we had the craze going," Lynn says.

Ah, the craze. You have to understand the hardcore Furby hunter. In search of the rare and wily Furby, they visit Famous Toy Store three or four times a day, hoping to catch a shipment as it arrives. Hundreds of them call the story daily. When they walk in, Lynn says, "Hello." They respond, "Got Furbies?" They don't like taking no for an answer.

Lynn's seen the craze before. She saw a heaving, pressing crowd demanding Furbies at a Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving. "It was too much for me to grasp," she says. "Adults doing this nasty growl-fight thing is disgusting to me." At Famous Toy Store, she once saw a mother look on approvingly as her teenage daughter grabbed a Furby from a woman's hand.

This time, though, Lynn was in the middle of the growl-fight thing. A crowd quickly formed and the Furby started flying. "One couple left their baby in the basket so they could both try to get one," Lynn says. She was confronted by a thicket of desperately clutching hands as the buyers shouted color preferences or demanded an exemption to the one-per-customer rule. "I was just handing them to hands," she says.

The craze made the people irrational. A man and a woman each had the color of Furby the other wanted. A simple exchange, no? No. Their heads apparently swelling with the fierce joy of acquiring a Furby and the abject fear of losing it, neither would let go. "I felt like I was about to be in the middle of a fight," Lynn says.

And then the craze subsided -- the boxes were empty. Elapsed time from the first Furby to the last: "Less than five minutes," Lynn says.

And so, let me close by wishing Furby hunters everywhere a Merry Christmas to all and to all a good fight.