Back in like 3rd grade I wasn't a popular kid, and like every 'fad' would come and go through the schoolyard, marbles, pokemon cards, tazo's, I noticed that if you had the most 'stuff' in one of these fads there was a correlation with having more friends. Then I thought right, next fad I'll nail this shit.
Then the next fad was pens.
Yes, in class one kid came in with a nice parker pen his dad gave him as a present for getting his pen license and suddenly pens were the fad, fountain pens, fineliners, your bic biro was basically the equlivilent of a pikachu card or a cats-eye. We had all gone mad on pen-licenses. Like when you get your first car and you try and get the coolest, fastest car you can, we did a 3rd grade version of that...with pens.
The school yard economics of scarcity and value were in full effect only now with pens. And I thought this is my fad, I need new pens, if I have cool pens, cool kids will trade with me and thus I will be cool. So I started stealing pens from the post office. They had everything, really nice fineliners, the gold and silver ink pens, and I stole all of them. I came to school with my pencil case filled with stolen booty, I had pens in colors the other kids didn't even know existed. And every day I would steal more pens and bring them to school the next day, kids would be like 'where are you getting them' and at 8 years cool I'd nonchalantly say "I just know people".
This went on for a couple of weeks, pretty soon I was living the high life, I even started trading pens for favors and just giving pens to people I liked, but it didn't last. I even traded pens for the best items from previous fads just in case they came around again, I traded twenty glitter pens for a kids pokemon card album (which as an adult I got $900 for on ebay, first editions gooo!). I was looking at this long term, I was living the life and I though it would last forever, but everything ends.
Two weeks and 230 pens later I got caught, luckily I didn't get into trouble (parents never even found out), when the guy at the post office saw me I only had one pen in my pockets, and it was one I'd stolen the day before (A blue pen with the liquid ink & liquid levels on the side of it, I had it because these were popular, I needed more and I didn't want to get to the post office and forget which pen to steal).
He wasn't having it, took my pen off me (technically his pen), and told me never to come back or I'll tell your parents, which at the time terrified me. How was I going to send Santa a letter asking him for more pens? The next week after that was rough though, suddenly I had no pens, when I rocked up with a pencil case without any contraband I the jig was up, my new friends left me in droves. I tumbled back down the social ladder and prayed for the day pokemon cards would be back in. But they never came back in :(.