MARK MY WORD: MOVE OVER, ELMO: IT'S TEENIE BEANIE BABY TIME

Moms and dads are flocking to McDonald's these days. We just can't help ourselves.

It's not the food we crave, but those cute, little Teenie Beanie Babies. Of course, we tell everyone that we're buying them for our children or grandchildren.

No self-respecting adult wants to admit to collecting those fuzzy bean bags for themselves.

For parents, real news is news they can use. They don't care who President Clinton has over to the White House for coffee, unless, of course, it's someone who has access to a whole warehouse of those teeny, tiny animal-shaped bean bags.

There's been a run on Beanie Babies that rivals the run on banks during the Great Depression. Pretty soon, those Teenie Beanie Babies will be extinct. The babies, which are deposited in Happy Meals, are Chops the Lamb, Patti the Platypus, Goldie the Goldfish, Seamore the Seal, Quacks the Duck, Pinky the Flamingo, Chocolate the Moose, Speedy the Turtle, Lizz the Lizard and Snort the Bull.

McDonald's ordered nearly 100 million of the cuddly toys, but that's apparently not enough. Whole areas around the country are running out of the critters.

A supervisor at McDonald's in Jackson has his priorities straight. "We've got the turtle and the moose, welcome to McDonald's," he greeted telephone callers.

I know this because my wife, an intrepid journalist, Joni, called around to the area McDonald's restaurants just to see what Teenie Beanies they had. It's called research, and somebody has to do it.

The supervisor said they have been getting as many as 300 telephone calls a day, and 99 percent of the callers just want to know what Beanie Baby is in the bag. There are only so many Snorts you can take.

Some stores in other areas have even taken their phones off the hook so they'll have time to fry the fries.

The Broadway McDonald's in Cape Girardeau ran through its entire five-week supply in two weeks, but fortunately for parents and collectors everywhere, it received a second shipment of the tiny toys. And the craze started all over again.

One exhausted employee of three years said he had never seen anything like it. By the time this is all over, the giant restaurant chain will probably have to offer psychological counseling so its employees can recover from all this beanie babble.

On the first day of the promotion in St. Louis, one woman reportedly bought 300 Happy Meals at a single restaurant and threw away the food. Since then, McDonald's restaurants have imposed a limit of 10 Happy Meals per customer in order to make the toy supply last.

Just what makes these Teenie Beanie Babies so appealing? Most local McDonald's workers we talked to didn't have a clue. One theorized it was just a matter of supply and demand. Move over, Elmo.

In St. Louis, some grandmothers have taken to driving from restaurant to restaurant, ordering carloads of Happy Meals just to get all those bean bags for their grandchildren.

Joni and I, however, have been more restrained. We have managed to collect four of the cute critters, but we aren't stampeding for more.

Perhaps, it's the fact that we're running out of room for all those fast-food toys that have piled up in our house over the last five years since the birth of our two daughters.

We aren't going to let a little bean bag dictate our life. What's that? Patti the Platypus has been spotted in Happy Meals at a local McDonald's. I've got to run and grab one. But rest assured, I'll do it with restraint.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.