Five thousand shoppers stormed a department store in Charleston, West Virginia, and knocked over the display tables before store staff could even open the boxes, according to FOX 29 Philadelphia. A manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania grabbed a baseball bat and climbed onto a counter to hold back a crowd of a thousand people who had waited eight hours in the cold. By the time the 1983 holiday season ended, a soft-sculpture doll with a cabbage-patch birth certificate had triggered actual crowd violence in stores across the country. It happened because the company that made them could not produce nearly enough.

A Doll Born, Not Bought

Cabbage Patch Kids were the creation of Xavier Roberts, a 21-year-old art student in North Georgia who had seen a Kentucky folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas selling handmade cloth dolls with their own adoption papers, according to Wikipedia’s sourced history of the toy. Roberts began stitching his own versions, calling them “The Little People,” and eventually stopped buying from Thomas and started mass-producing similar dolls through factories in Hong Kong. Thomas sued him over the design; the case was settled out of court in 1985 for an undisclosed amount, per the same account. Roberts licensed the concept to the toy company Coleco, which renamed the line Cabbage Patch Kids and built a marketing campaign around the idea that each doll was “born” and required legal adoption rather than a simple purchase.

Demand Coleco Couldn’t Match

Coleco shipped roughly 3.3 million dolls in 1983, but that wasn’t close to enough for a country that wanted them for Christmas, according to Wikipedia’s account of the company’s production figures. An FAO Schwarz spokesperson later summed up the shortage bluntly to Time magazine: the dolls were “over-advertised and under-produced,” a quote preserved in FOX 29’s retrospective reporting. Coleco’s stock had already ridden the frenzy from $6.87 to $36.75 a share in 1982 alone, according to the Wikipedia entry documenting the riots, which meant there was little incentive to slow marketing down even as shelves emptied within minutes of restocking.

Baseball Bats and Broken Bones

The worst incidents came the day after Thanksgiving, an early and violent preview of what Black Friday would become. At the Zayre store in Wilkes-Barre, roughly 1,000 shoppers surged in after an eight-hour wait, and one woman suffered a broken leg in the crush, according to FOX 29’s account of the incident. The store’s entire supply of 240 dolls reportedly sold out in about half an hour. In Huntington, New York, shoppers who had waited up to four hours at a Toys “R” Us grew angry enough that police had to be called in after the store ran out of stock, per the same report. A store manager elsewhere described the scene to Time magazine in stark terms: “They knocked over the display table. People were grabbing at each other, pushing and shoving. It got ugly,” a quote also cited by FOX 29. In Wilkes-Barre, the Zayre manager, William Shigo, told the New York Times at the time, “This is my life that’s in danger,” a line documented by ABC7 Los Angeles in its own archival review of the chaos.

A Black Market Formed Almost Instantly

Once official inventory vanished, a resale economy sprang up overnight. At Rowe-Manse Emporium in Clifton, New Jersey, dolls that retailed for $21 were changing hands for as much as $50, and the store itself set up a trading post letting people resell dolls for $40 while it pocketed a $10 cut, according to ABC7’s report. Some desperate parents told reporters they were calling relatives in other states, as far away as Nebraska and California, hoping someone near a store with stock could grab one and ship it home in time for Christmas.

The Panic Faded, the Formula Didn’t

By 1984, Coleco had ramped up manufacturing enough to move roughly 20 million dolls, generating about $2 billion in retail sales across North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, according to Wikipedia’s sourced production data. The worst of the shoving matches subsided as supply caught up with demand, but the underlying mechanism — hype a toy relentlessly, then let it run scarce right before the one weekend everyone is buying gifts — never really went away. It resurfaced with Tickle Me Elmo in 1996 and Furby in 1998, and it’s the same math retailers still run every November, just with better crowd control and security guards standing where department store managers once stood with baseball bats.