One of my most vivid memories setting up at shows when I was a teenager as a weekend warrior, during the late 80's, was being set up at the Danbury Fair Mall in CT, the same week the Billy Ripken FF card was discovered.
89 Fleer had just come out, and between the FF card and the Griffey Jr. and Gary Sheffield Rookies, everybody was going nuts over it.
Looking back in hindsight, there was absolutely no shortage of it either. They were selling for over 100 bucks a box...but seemingly EVERYBODY had them......and this was just the first run of them, before they corrected or hacked the rest of the Ripken cards in the print run.
The FF card probably sold Fleer an extra 1/2 a million cases of cards that year.
Thing was, if you pulled an FF, you could throw it out on your table for $100 bucks, and less then 10 minutes later it would be gone, basically paying for your box. People literally thought, this was going to be the next 52 Mantle.
That was a wild weekend.