The Cabbage Patch Kids also preceded the expensive line of American Girl dolls, where kids could customize the dolls to look exactly like them. But on a more positive note, the fiasco inspired the 1986 comedy film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jingle All the Way. The Cabbage Patch frenzy would go down in history as one of the world’s most intense Black Friday sales as people physically fought each other and traveled the world to get one. Along with a growing line of bikes, pajamas, lunchboxes and cereal, Coleco generated over $4.5 billion in 1984. Coleco used a withholding strategy to keep them selling year-round instead of just during the holidays, which definitely worked. One psychologist called this type of behavior as Nazism as the dolls possessed a “higher power” over their consumers.īy New Year’s Day, Coleco sold over three million Cabbage Patch Kids. Some dolls worth $25 were resold for $150. One man had even flew to London to buy a doll for his five-year-old daughter. Those more impatient and cruel would rip boxes from strangers’ arms without even looking at the doll or the person holding it. As thousands of dolls came in, they were gone within hours. But as soon as customers paid, they were forced to push their way through the crowd and past those piling in from the parking lots.
To curb the flocks from crowding in, store managers moved all their supply of dolls to the front of the store. By Thanksgiving, they called it the “Cabbage Patch Panic.” The Cabbage Patch Kids’ manufacturer at the time, Coleco, said all of their supply of two million dolls was gone by October 6th. Christmas shoppers bought an average of three dolls each, and the stores couldn’t keep up with their supply. The Cabbage Patch Panic of 1983īut the people who suffered were the retailers they didn’t expect to have such a booming demand in time for Christmas.
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From then on, the dolls were on the covers of major magazines, TV commercials and newspapers, taking over all major media outlets.
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When the young locals arrived, it turned out to be a mass adoption ceremony as the media cameras got it all on tape and the kids got a free doll. When the dolls were first introduced in June of 1983 during a publicity circuit, the company held a press conference at the Boston Children’s Museum. Inside each box were the adoption papers, waiting to be signed. The dolls were also marketed like babies, actually playing on people’s nurturing instincts to “adopt a doll.” The goal was to trigger the endorphins in their consumers’ minds as one would when picking up a baby from a crib. Each doll could be customized to have different color eyes, hair, skin, different outfit, smile, freckles and dimple location. Everyone loved Cabbage Patch Dolls back in the day because no doll was the same as the other. So exactly why were they so popular? And why were people clawing and climbing over each other on Black Friday in 1983 just to get one?
According to Newsweek, “it was as if an army had been turned loose on the nation’s shopping malls, ravaging the ficus tress, sloshing through the fountains, searching for the legendary stockrooms said to be filled with those of the dough-faced, chinless, engagingly homely dolls.” Why Cabbage Patch Kids Were so Popularįor those of you who don’t understand what all the fuss was about, they did look like regular old dolls. Every parent in America went completely ballistic over them.
If you were around during the 80s, you most likely remember the craze of the Cabbage Patch Kids in 1983.
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