Pokémon Scalpers: End of a Journey Together?
Trading card scalping has been around for over 5 years now. Since the early pandemic times, massive Pokémon card buyouts have been on the rise. This rise comes from a variety of reasons, including personal financial gain and people driven by nostalgia.
This massive buying out of cards has led to an unbalanced market. The extent to which scalpers have gone through in order to gain control and profit from this market are immeasurable. Reports have seen buyers waiting outside retail stores like Walmart and Target with lawn chairs and pillows, waiting during the night for stores to open in order to snag up the latest Pokémon drop.
“One time I was on a cruise, and there were like 20 packs of Obsidian Flames, and when I came back 20 minutes later with my friends they were all gone,” said sophomore Jayden Nicolas.
Massive buyouts not only occur in physical stores but also through online retailers as well. The name for these “digital shoppers” is automated shopping bots. Automated shopping bots can easily buy up card stock in fractions of a second. This leaves manual collectors struggling to secure any new drop for retail price.
Bots work in a variety of ways for the benefit of scalpers; software embedded in these bots constantly runs scans on retailer pages in order to find information on stock changes and drop alerts. Along with those advantages, bots can add items to a cart and complete checkout details faster than any human can.
To combat resellers, Target and Walmart have begun to enforce strict purchasing rules. Target is moving high-demand items to behind checkout counters, requiring buyers to purchase Pokémon cards solely through guest services or specific release windows. Walmart, on the other hand, has placed a strict storewide cap for high-demand trading cards, with Pokémon limited to 5 packs or boxes per customer per visit.
For online resellers, it’s another story; major retailers fight against scalpers in two major ways. One method is deploying anti-bot software that actually works on their sites to combat them head-on. AI is also being used to monitor transactions around these high-ticket cards. Along with physical retailers, quantity limits are still being imposed online.
A bunch of factors come into play when trying to figure out how the scalper craze even began. Economics play a much larger role in the reason people scalp than one might think. Scalping has always existed within the trading card community, but as technology advances, so does the ability to scalp. Some people have made an entire career off scalping and live off the money they make from reselling.
Due to digital platforms becoming more popular, buying and selling cards has never been easier. Cards take up little storage space, making them easy to stock up on and ship, adding to the accessibility factor. Pokémon is very popular among consumers, usually outcompeting other trading card manufacturers in sales by a long shot. Resellers take this popular demand and use it to flip their cash.
The cost of Pokémon card packs in reality is fairly cheap; this makes them easily accessible to scalpers, who in turn buy them all out and resell them at a higher price than market value in order to make money off of consumers. Increased demand to “test your luck” and pull the “chase” with Pokémon trading card packs is another reason why people still buy at these above-market-value prices.
“With time passing, people realized more and more the value in something being rare and limited. Specifically recently, this has become a genuine problem as people who don’t even care about the game, only see profit, and ruin the experience for kids,” said freshman at Miami Dade College, Angel Gonzalez.
Pokémon cards, or high-value rare cards and old originals to be specific, can easily reach prices from five to thousands of dollars. The amount of money that is profitable from the reselling of these cards catches the attention of many people aiming to make a quick buck.
There are various online markets such as TCGPlayer and eBay that specialize in trading cards or have categories within them that do. Those markets consist of various sellers that share one main goal: to turn as much profit as one possibly can on a pull.
“Before, it was about collecting cool cards and hopefully getting that EX card. Now, it’s about collecting the most valuable card in the set, and anything less is trash. All of the whimsy that was once in this hobby has vanished,” said freshman student at Broward College, Evan Maldonado.
With all of these factors coming into play, the hobby is getting increasingly more and more difficult to enjoy. Scalpers are leaving true enjoyers of Pokémon cards stumped. The future of Pokémon is left in the hands of the scalpers who control the market.
