Walking into Build-A-Bear is essentially walking into a taxidermy shop for imaginary creatures. You literally walk up to a wall of deflated, lifeless, inside-out corpses, pick your favorite carcass, and carry its limp empty sack of a body to a machine. They make you rub a small satin heart on your head, your chest, and your hands to "give it a soul" right before they brutally sew its back shut. It is essentially a pagan ritual to trap a spirit inside a cotton prison. The actuall process of "building" involves an employee shoving a giant metal pipe directly into the bear's rear end to violently pump it full of synthetic fluff until its limbs inflate.
