To anyone in tune with today's pop culture, it's no secret that the Pokemon TCG has had an absolutely massive resurgence in the past couple of years. The original trading cards continue to auction for astonishing amounts, consistently making news headlines every few months or so. However, due to certain cards' extremely high resell value, so too do stories of Pokemon card scalping.
Launched in North America during the 1998 holiday season, Pokemon TCG was a runaway success upon its initial release. Pokemon as a whole marks its 25th anniversary this year, which the company has been celebrating through various avenues. In addition to offering Pokemon cards via McDonald's Happy Meals, it recently revealed its 25th annivesary Pokemon card collection, which will include special foil and promo cards.
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The viral image in question comes courtesy of the Pokemon TCG subreddit. Captioned with the sarcastic line of "finally found Pokemon cards at Walmart," the photo shows the retail chain's toy section, where the shelves have been utterly decimated of any actual and intact Pokemon TCG products. While it would be one thing if the sparse shelves were from items simply being bought out, booster pack packaging can be seen ripped open and tossed back onto the shelf, along with full decks missing from their boxes, indicating the cards were stolen by scalpers. A handful of Water-type cards strewn on the top shelf are essentially all that remains.
Given how the Pokemon TCG has always been considered to be a children's product, one would think that overzealous kids or teenagers would be the ones responsible for the rampant retail raids happening around the nation. However, in the case of at least one video, well-grown adults appear to be the culprits leaving devastated store displays like the image above in their wake. A few months ago, a video went viral showing Pokemon TCG scalpers stampeding through a Walmart the second it opens to buy up all of the coveted cards. The situation is unfortunately not unique, with reports of similar behavior frequently popping up all over the country.
While there might be a small percentage of people who truly are that big a fan of the cards, the majority's motivation is the intent to resell. Reselling Pokemon cards can prove to be a lucrative business by nature, considering how valuable cards are acquired through randomized card packs. Next-gen consoles have also been suffering a similar fate, with electronic component shortages making a new PS5 and Xbox Series X hard to come by for the foreseeable future. In fact, one 16-year-old has made $1.7 million in reselling both the cards and consoles over the course of just 18 months.
With the upcoming anniversary cards set to release this October, its fairly safe to say images like these will likely be replicated at more stores in just a few months' time. While its inevitability is rather unfortunate, fans can at least say it's their "job" to be there, as Pokemon fans can get paid to hunt down cards.
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