A Snoopy plushie from CVS dressed in a puffer jacket is the season’s hottest toy. Good luck snagging one.

The hottest gift of the season among Gen Z retails for about $15. The hard part is finding it.

In the last month, a seemingly inconspicuous Snoopy plushie from CVS has exploded in popularity, sparking passionate convenience store hunts, heated social media threads, and a slew of online resale attempts.

The plushie in question is a medium-size Snoopy dressed in a striped beanie and an overly puffed puffer jacket. It retails in stores for between $13.99 and $16.99.

It’s unclear what sparked the internet’s full-blown obsession with this particular Snoopy vs. other Peanuts toys, but Google Search Trends show nationwide interest began percolating around Nov. 10 before spiking on Nov. 12.

On TikTok, content creators have documented their quest to find the plushie — some more successful than others. One user’s video of purchasing the Snoopy and then taking it around town has garnered about 20,000 likes.

“I went to three different stores today with no luck,” one commenter wrote. “Crying because my CVS didn’t get any,” said another.

Erika Siemasko, 24, of Massachusetts was one of the lucky ones.

“We were immediately lucky, finding three of them at the CVS five minutes away from home,” she said. “I knew this was rare, as I was seeing lots of people on TikTok traveling to multiple CVS locations. There were even comments on my TikTok video of Snoopy asking if I could go buy the other ones I found and ship it to them.”

Jon Klippenstein, 21, of Minnesota, had a similar experience earlier this month.

“I found out about the big puffer Snoopy from a TikTok I saw the first morning they showed up in stores,” he said. “I had just woken up, went straight to my car, and showed up to a CVS in full sweats to look for one.”

Klippenstein scored and posted a video of his Snoopy that day. It was viewed about 275,000 times and earned more than 14,000 likes.

“It wasn’t until I got home and posted the video that I found out how much trouble other people were having finding them,” he said. “My Tiktok was flooded with comments saying that stores were sold out and begging for help finding a Snoopy. I guess I just got lucky to have found out about them before the craze started.”

Indeed, the craze has prompted many CVS locations — including locations across Philadelphia — to sell out of the plushie entirely according to online inventory trackers (which are not 100% reliable but can help gauge availability).

One TikTok user said she and her boyfriend called nine different CVS stores and drove 45 minutes across town to secure a Snoopy of their own.

On Reddit, a user who purportedly works at CVS said that “over 10 customers” had come into their store over the last few days to ask if they still had the plushies in stock.

“This thing will be the bane of my existence for the next two to four weeks,” the worker wrote.

Some are going as far as reselling the plushies on sites including eBay and Poshmark for as much as four times the original price. Around 200 Snoopy plushies are currently listed and selling on eBay ranging in price from $35 to $75.

So why is it so popular? Well, the consensus online is that it’s very cute, an affordable treat, his jacket and hat are removable so you can dress him however you’d like, and also he has “New York vibes.”

“Stuffed animals and plushies have become so normalized for young adults now, which I love,” Siemasko reasoned. “Come on, it was Snoopy in a puffer jacket! I think if you take something that’s already adored by many, like Snoopy, and add something trendy that will appeal to Gen Z, like a puffer jacket, you have a great product.”

It’s not the first time a Snoopy item has gone viral this year.

A Build-A-Bear version of Snoopy remains sold out online. “SnoopyTok” remains a popular corner of TikTok for Gen Zers to watch wholesome clips of the Peanuts gang. In April, a Red Cross T-shirt featuring Snoopy that was only available for blood donors became all the rage.

“I was like, I need this shirt,” Christina Perez, a 20-year-old bioengineering student at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times at the time. She saw the T-shirt on TikTok on a Wednesday night and booked an appointment to give blood the next day.

And, of course, he flew in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But this year, he was in a new outfit.

Ramping up for the new Apple TV+ series, Camp Snoopy, which premieres in 2024, the parade featured “Beagle Scout Snoopy,” the parade’s ninth version of the beloved character. It also made Snoopy the longest-running character balloon to appear in the parade, according to Macy’s.

Elise Hannum of the Atlantic says Snoopy is a Gen Z icon.

“Some fans say that his personality speaks to their inner child: He plays pretend and dreams big, while finding joy in little wins such as receiving a full bowl of food,” she wrote in a piece titled ‘The Hero Gen Z Needs.’ “But Snoopy’s grand feelings also reflect his existential side — a reminder of the comic’s original gloomy tone, the perception of which was softened and sanitized over subsequent decades. It seems that a new generation is finally seeing Snoopy for who he really is.”

Siemasko said she thinks Snoopy unites generations.

“Not only is it nostalgic for me, as we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown every Halloween after trick-or-treating, but it’s nostalgic for my parents, too,” she said. “I actually walked into my living room the other day to see my parents watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special just spontaneously. I hope it continues to be a classic for generations to come.”