Pokémon Trading Card Scalpers Are Causing Some Ugly Scenes Right Now

30 year olds? Really?

With the live competitive scene basically shut down, why is there even a market for resellers?

This is exactly why I got out of collecting… it’s become a business, no longer a hobby. With social media and some “bigger fish” collecting what they call “modern art”… it’s become impossible for everyday people to collect what they love. Sold my whole collection to put a down payment on a house… there’s more to life than price gouging cartoon cardboard

Comic Book Guy was intended to be a satirical figure, not a role model.

This is what happens on online stores, but you just don't see it in person LOL. (No but really What the F***) I love pokemon cards as much as the next guy, I mean I have alot maybe not as much as others but I good amount, but damn, what happen to just trading cards??!

Edit: also why in the world dose walmart allow this stuff to happen, the dude on the left just swiped a whole row, Now I know you shouldn't be allow to buy the half of the damn cards, I mean dude look at all the packs he has is soo much???!

Absolutely diabolical!!! The easiest way that this whole sorry mess can be resolved is for each and every card to be produced in their thousands, and for 'rare/limited' cards to not be produced anymore.

Pokemon in 2001: Children trading cards

Pokemon in 2021: Child-men raiding cards

Gotta snatch ‘em all.

I only play the online version now.

Dummies, sacrificing paper money goals or imagined wealth over personal respect, and respect in general; spoiling things for others

These wild animals need to be tamed.

@TDRsuperstar2 It’s really sad. I’m a big whisky fan myself and it’s the exact same thing, just scaled up slightly. People buying 100s of bottles and never drinking a drop

@thejuice027 I’m the same with yugioh! I’d never touch physical, but online is a lot neater and cheaper

Creating value out of not enjoying a commercial product is just sad, and I'm glad that reading the comments here, a lot of people still agree with that idea.
Just play your card games, read your comic books.
In some years the market will crash just like it did for everything else, all we will have won is kids not being able to play cards.

Imagine wasting your time with scalping when crypto exists.

the comments here are from the highest virtual ivory towers

TCG’s - the original “blind box/rng/gacha” gambling addiction for kids.

As seen here, a lot of kids were unable to lose their addictions.

Untapupkeepdraw...

I used to buy pokemon cards for the love of playing the game itself, not for collecting. It'd so sad what's happening now.

@Handy_Man : Or put down.

I work in a place where these are supposed to be sold but of course the entire section is just continually empty. Despite this, I will see folks standing in that aisle staring at the empty shelves several times a day. They just seem lost and it's very strange.

Well, it's a lot better than what Pokémon trainers do abducting these poor creatures from the wild, trapping them in tiny little cages no bigger than a softball and forcing them to fight for their own personal glory.

I work at Target. At first we tried limiting it to 2 packs then 1 then pulling them from shelves altogether indefinitely. It was worse than the PS5 people as far as drama and scenes. At first they were limiting NFL,NBA, cards because the people waiting in line for us to open were too embarrassed to admit they were buying Pokemon cards.

@nukatha

People are following a Trend, thats all.

Humans are the worst.

Greed... we can do better

Lord, this is sad. It’s cardboard. At least the people rushing to buy toilet paper were buying a useful product.

I don’t understand the current demand for Pokémon cards, but for people poo-poo-ing this behavior, try to look at it from another perspective. Times are tough for a lot of people, and if there’s money to be made getting these packs in the wild and selling on ebay I’m having a hard time judging them.

There are several four letter words to describe the individuals in that video. Were I to state them here I would be forever banned from this site, but those men most certainly are each and every one of those four letter words....

As sad as sad can be.

@TDRsuperstar2 Amen to that

There is an easy solution to all of this... stop buying Pokemon cards. And if you are desperate enough to pay 10x the normal price, maybe you don't deserve to handle finances in your household.

@nessisonett Hahaha xD Imagine if pokemon were printed on that toilet paper

@nukatha My guess is that it’s because of all the “My Pokémon card from 20 years ago got me $4M” news stories and videos that have been everywhere as of late.

this is cringe of the highest degree. i feel really sorry for the shop workers and the poor sods that buy from most of these guys on line

@MatoFilipovic

they'd proberly still go crazy for it BUT at lest they can dry their own tears with it ! lol

@thejuice027 same here

This is sad, disgusting and honestly pathetic. Bonus points to the idiot wearing a mask below his nose.

That's honestly disgusting.

They'll have to start selling them like they're cigarettes or something.

Imagine if any of those scalpers had kids. I can see them being role models like:

"Hey kids, you wanna be something in your life? You gotta be ***** about what you do"

@res1080p Haha, good one xD

If it ain't toilet paper it's.... Well this...

This is all on YouTubers wanting views and encouraging their child armies to do the same in hopes that they'll say their name on stream or something. This nonsense wasn't a thing this time last year when the cards were still very much widely available. Once views stop coming in from card pack openings (and they will, kids lose interest quickly,) things will go back to normal.

My kids want a pack here and there but I've only found one in the last month. The dumb thing is, you spend 5 dollars and probably get 1 dollar worth of cards in 9 out of 10 packs. If you're buying all the packs to scalp that's not profitable. Smh

But they are all such alluring specimens!

Be still my heart...sigh.

What's next? Robbing small children off their Pokémon cards? These people are disgusting.

@pip_muzz Is that four letter word... cool 😎😎😎😎

We stopped buying boosters as its much cheaper to just buy the cards you want separately rather than waiting on a random chance of getting the cards you need to uild a deck.
Especially when the Mrs refuses to use anything apart from Fairy types.

@Silly_G I'd like to think that the entire US is just satire. It makes it easier to sleep at night. It's scary how much The Simpsons got right.

I have absolutely no respect for scalpers and their excuses. They are a group to blame for worsening the goddamn semiconductor shortage by increasing demand. Them doing this makes me hate them more.

I don’t understand this.

@Gravitron so like prophylactics? Anybody can by them, you just can’t be embarrassed to ask for it.

They’re all dude-bros…

Any guesses to what their deck builds would be?

@DomGC Yeah my baby brother used to go to Walmart with me and buy a pack once in a while. Now they’re perpetually sold out.

it's like black friday but for pokemon cards

Yeah, I heard about this. Stupid scalping loonies. Thanks for ruining it for kids and regular collectors with your greedy, awful behavior.

@Spiders So your saying it's a perfectly acceptable excuse to beat up others and pull guns on people so you can flip a child's card game?

I haven’t bought Pokémon cards since they did a re-release of the original base set a few years ago. Even then, it was for fun due to both nostalgia and my brother-in-law collecting them as well. Unfortunately, I never finished my collection.
But this though is just utter ridiculousness, and pure greed that lousy scalpers- who have no interest in Pokémon to begin with- are ruining it for fans who do enjoy the TCG.

Sorry but what *****! Ruin it for everybody else. It's sad to see this happening 😂 not true fans just nasty Scalpers! I really hope pokemon release more to stop this happening. Collecting the cards just ain't as fun these days.

You say these people are a bunch of losers, but they are making a ton of money with these cards, many of them don't even care about Pokémon, the real losers are the ones buying from them.

Humanity at its finest.

Wow, they all look like clones. Fat 30-year-old white man wearing baseball cap

@Tempestryke I’m not saying it’s acceptable - it isn’t. Just that it might be more understandable if you consider the possible circumstances people are in, and the solutions being proposed to solve this are only taking into account from a consumer perspective, not why a black market filled with desperate people is so prevalent in America right now.

@victordamazio Nah, they're losers too. No sane or regular person would run into a store to buy packs of children's card games so they can later resell them online to other adults.

Scalpers are the original losers who artificially jacked up the prices.

@NTDO89 Is that really why the market exploded? That’s bananas.

I bought a couple Pokemon happy meal toys when they were in McDonald's (Pikachu and Rowlet) and the Detective Pikachu from Burger King. That was before this sort of scalping behaviour became a thing. From now on I'm not going to buy any more if they show up again, because I don't want to be taking some kid's joy away from them.

Absolutely pathetic and disgusting people, these are made for kids to enjoy and these sad excuses for human beings are desperate to make a few quid off of them. Every single one of them just needs to f*** o**

i love collecting pokemon and yugioh cards but this bs has gotten out of hand no wonder why i cant find any at stores cause we got greedy douchebags swiping all of them this is just sad.

@Dingelhopper their not just for kids especially wen it comes to magic the gathering and others as well.

I love collecting Pokemon cards, but I can't enjoy one of my favorite hobbies now without paying out the nose for it because these people who likely care nothing about Pokemon want to scam people for easy money. I know that there are much more pressing issues in the world, but I see this as greedy people taking advantage of a situation.

People just have to stop buying them form scalpers plain and simple. I know it’s sucks but just stop creating demand and they’ll stop.

@nukatha Collectors of rare cards

@RedGuy42 This was my first thought. The gold rush mirage.

Those scalpers are becoming a real-life Team Rocket, minus the stealing of Pokemon from respectable trainers! Still, I should be grateful that scalpers in general aren't targeting Sonic the Hedgehog's 30th Anniversary goods. He's already worthless as it is. Should be Indie like ToeJam & Earl.

Scalping should be illegal. No questions asked

@Maxz It's quite hilarious (and pathetic in this case) how a series that's targeted towards a young audience is technically actually targetting teens to adults.

Even though I agree I agree with the tweet, can you pick a comment that doesn't have single-digit likes?

@Entrr_username Unfortunately, we need the authority of Congress to make it illegal in America. It needs to be made into a bill, then it has to be voted for in the House and Senate, then the President Biden must sign it into law, and any scalpers that sell their stock at inflated prices will be arrested and their items will be sold at regular price!

While it's definitely a "oh, COME ON" situation how they're acting either way...those aren't Pokémon cards they're even grabbing in that video. Which makes the framing of the tweet misleading, as it's maybe symbolic of how people are acting over Pokémon cards, but not an actual example of it.

What is wrong with these people? Don't they have a sense of honor? Of pride?

I have much hatred

Not the least surprised. Scalpers are buying all kinds of different items to resell. Anything hot or hard to find they buy and then mark up 200% or more. Sucks.

Admittedly it's been a good while since I played the Pokémon TCG, but this kind of frenzied (scalping?) behavior feels like it just crept out of nowhere within the last year or two. I'm curious where this fevered pitch has come from. It would be very much appreciated if NL staff here could thoroughly research and explain the phenomenon in a future piece.

This is what happens when we grow up in a society full of man-babies

@sanderev This is kind of robbing children of their cards?
By removing them from the stores and putting them out online for a price that these kids can't afford

The shops should require people to make an appointment to purchase the cards and limit purchases to one pack. No more bloodshed.

Where is your dignity, man?

Collecting things is just plain weird. I guess it figures that's is us men that tend to do it too. We are generally more weird...!!

@nocdaes They are not collecting them, they are selling them. For a lot of money.

I see this and then I see the families that come into work that struggle to pay bills and put food on the table. Our society is screwed up. We value cardboard more than our neighbors and those at at the top have turned everything into a competition of gloating over others.

My faith teaches that humanity is sinful by nature, and in need of a redeemer to not just save us but to change our hearts. While we who believe have a lot of institutional issues to address and clean up, things like this always reminds me of that central truth about the natural state of humanity.

This is what happens when scalping becomes normalized.

This explosion in physical scalping also contains a side effect of catalyzing the transition to digital products.

What is the point anymore in being a collector of physical products if enough scalpers are trying to turn every physical collectible into the financial purgatory that is the live performing arts? Broadway tickets actually aren't that expensive. It's the middle-men who systematically buy up every single theatre ticket and skyrocket the "base" prices to hundreds of dollars, and those scalpers ruin the whole industry, with only the affluent able to appreciate the average Broadway play.

I would rather opt out entirely of any of these collectible hobbies than to begin paying ridiculous prices simply because enough scalpers are all in agreement to scoop up every physical copy.

a a a a Animals

I'm glad I hid several packs (About 40 packs of Battle Styles, 10 of Vivid Voltage) at my local walmart. I'll personally restock a few packs when I visit again.

This is a joke 😡

The people defending this behaviour. OOF.
I do understand that people need money right now and that's completely understandable. I have sold things that were precious to me at the 'sold listing' price when I needed to, which in theory makes me no better than them really but these guys are not poor or struggling, this was clearly a pre meditated orchestrated thing, not a desperate move to make ends meet. I got to enjoy my childhood so why ruin it for other children? All the kids holding their Pokemon plushies in town when I go out, its wholesome and adorable that a franchise has transcended generations even though it may not be for 'me' anymore with GF/the Pokemon company's recent decisions. Why do us grown men and women who grew up with it think that this behaviour is ok? I would feel bad buying a happy meal at this point, let alone this.

I had a similar expierance when I was a kid. I was in my local card shop and I opened a pack of Pokemon cards I had just bought and pulled out a shiny Charizard. I was impressed by the artwork but another customer, a grown man buying baseball cards from the collector case, snatched it out of my hand. The employee stopped him from leaving thankfully and I got my card back. The customer made the argument that I, a "stupid" kid, will only wreck the card by playing it in the game. While he, a collector who buys and sells all kinds of trading cards, will "appreciate" the card for what it is.

I did indeed wreck that card by playing the card game with friends and I have no regrets.

Can someone explain why the the card gane has scalpers now?

@Fujimoto-San Nice pfp! Did you see the new Demon Slayer movie yet?

@kducky11 Thanks! I have actually, and it was quite the emotional ride. It was an amazing film and I'd highly recommend watching it (if you haven't already) in a heartbeat, ha ha.

Is that Ahsoka and The Child from The Mandalorian as your icon?

@Fujimoto-San I cried in the theater during the little brother part 😭

and yeah they are

@kducky11 Yeah. It had so many scenes that hit the feels for me too. I can't remember the last time a movie made me feel so emotional. The score was so amazing, especially during the last act of the film. I really can't wait for the DVD to release soon.

I knew it. I thought I recognized them!

what a bunch of idiots

two words Logan Paul @Paej13

Walmart needs to stop stocking trading cards and start stocking guns and ammo again. It's really a self rectifying problem when you think about it.