Courtesy of PhillyVoice – “She (Sara Gruen) did what anybody with a nose for fundraising and the patience for online auctions would do the day after Black Friday: She bought 156 of them.
Gruen – a New York Times best-selling author from Asheville, N.C. – wasn’t looking to turn a profit.
She planned to use the proceeds to help fund the defense of “an innocent man who’d run out of options while serving life without parole.”
She can’t say much about the case, beyond the fact that she’s working on a “Making A Murderer”-type docuseries about a man for whom she’s already racked up $150,000 in debt working on his behalf. She said everybody who pays attention to that legal genre will soon know his name. You can’t put a price on righting legal wrongs, she said.
Sure, spending $23,595.31 on toys – at an average price of $151 and change – may strike people as an insane idea. Considering their resale-market value, though, the idea makes sense.”
You know, I have to say – I’ve made some serious money flipping comic books on Ebay. I eventually had to give it up because I just didn’t have room on my plate to keep up with everything. People don’t realize that it’s actually pretty hard to make serious money doing stuff like this.
Still, I can’t say I blame Sara here for giving it the ol’ college try. When you see a business opportunity, you gots to jump on it before it’s gone. But, this isn’t even business! She’s doing this for some dude she can’t talk about, but she knows if she drops a reference to Making a Murderer in, people are going to go ape shit and buy her Hatchimals so that Brendan Dassey can watch Wrestlemania.
This is outside-the-box thinking right here, and I, personally, commend her for it.
“It never occurred to me that I’d have trouble getting rid of them,” she recalled over the phone on Monday.
At the end of her four-day purchase binge, she learned some harsh realities about listing numerous toys-of-the-season for sale on websites like eBay, Amazon and Bonanza.
It was around 2 a.m. when she got a message from eBay that sent her into a world of Hatchimal-related nightmares.
“Thank you for listing Hatchimals!” it read. “This item has limitations on the quantity that may be listed each week. You’ve reached this limit and will not be able to list at this time. You will be able to list another Hatchimals seven days after your LAST Hatchimals listing.”
That message arrived after listing just three of her 156 items. At that rate, she’d be able to sell another nine before Christmas.
“It felt like I got hit with a freight train. I waited until the next morning to tell my husband that I’d completely ruined us,” she said. “He should have murdered me. I ran up the credit cards for this. But, he feels sorry for me. He feels bad that I feel bad. I married a saint.”
You know what – I hate to say it, but let’s call a spade a spade here. This woman absolutely should have been murdered. Do you know what that kind of money could do in a retirement account over the course of twenty years? Totally worth murder, I don’t care what you say about ‘love,’ ‘vows,’ and ‘laws.’
This man is a veritable saint. He needs his own holiday pronto. But, SHIT – she’s only going to sell 12 of the 156 she orders before they become worthless hunks of plastic? Tough break.
But, this story just keeps unraveling.
“Now, she’s having nightmares about the creatures (like, all of them hatching at midnight, or children sneaking in and activating them all). That could be inspired by the fact that her place is a mess with Hatchimal boxes and bubble wrap everywhere.
“There’s a bunch of boxes on the porch right now,” she said. “Another 63 haven’t arrived yet.””
It’s taken a real dark turn, folks. She’s clearly hallucinating that these things are coming to life, or worse, human children are sneaking around her house. There’s clutter all over the office and the fucking porch and she’s got more on the way!
“Despite her fears that friends would see her message as spam, she wrote an in-depth explanation of this debacle on Facebook on Monday afternoon.
“So – and here I cringe and hang my head in shame and feel sick to my stomach — if you or anyone you know wants a Hatchimal, here is a link to my Shopify storefront,” she wrote. “I have a fortune invested, only one venue to offload them, and in only three weeks they will magically transform into useless pumpkins that will take up space in my office forever, and have caused my financial ruin.”
Fuck, people – why are you still reading this? Go buy a damn Hatchimal!
Stoney Keeley is the editor of the SoBros Network, Tennessee Titans Featured Analyst for Pro Football Spot, Contributor to FanSided’s Bama Hammer, and covers the WWE for WrestlingNews.co. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley, @PFSpot, @WrestlingNewsCo, @Bama_Hammer
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