When I moved to Phoenix, I checked out some card shops. I felt like the weirdo, looking for baseball and football cards. Much of it was Pokemon and all that other stuff. Many more people there for Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, etc. than sports.
There’s a sports collectibles store four blocks from my building. I’ve been dropping in for about six years now, and have gotten to know the older owner who operates the register himself. Bought a Cam Newton action figure for my Auburn friends. Fernando Tatis bobbleheads for a pair of my Padres-fan friends who’ve moved away. Things like that. Since the 90s his biggest sales were selling rare sports cards to collectors. It’s a niche business to run; there was never enough foot traffic to justify manning his shop for more than two days a week, and most of his bigger sales were done by appointment. But for over a year now, he tells me foot traffic into his store has increased to the point of keeping his store open throughout the week, and it’s all driven by the moronic Millennial rush for Pokémon cards. Over the weekend he told me that going into June nearly 90% of his store’s sales transactions are for Pokémon cards. And his customers for Pokémon cards are mostly men in their 30s and 40s – Millennials!
I point all this out to give an example of how overly propped the market suddenly is for Pokémon cards, which has sadly become overrun with scalpers, price gauging, resellers, and crypto investors looking to pump-n-dump – all turning a child’s hobby into a speculator’s wild west. And top-down, everybody is in on it – even the distributors and retailers. Retailers like Best Buy and Target and Walmart finally began imposing purchasing limits for not only Pokémon but also for One Piece trading cards (limit 2 booster packs/customer) after over a year of grown men aggressively mobbing product releases. But these limits were only imposed after footage of scalper fights kept spreading online and putting their store brands in a bad light.
Truth is Target and Walmart prefer their shelves emptied of Pokémon cards. So, why? It is more profitable for big retailers to keep their Pokémon shelves empty because it drives sales to their online markets. So, why drive sales online? Big retailers sell trading cards through partnerships with local gaming stores across the USA and make the same or greater cut from these partnership sales than they do from those same trading card items sold in their stores. This keeps the product delivery, stocking, and sale itself outside their stores while profiting with the same margin from gaming store partnerships handling everything offsite.
Take the example pricing below for One Piece trading cards from Best Buy and Walmart. The MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) for One Piece booster packs (12 cards) is $4.99. In store, big retailers are more obliged to offer prices closer to MSRP. But online, it’s easier to get away with marking up prices through their gaming store partnerships charging booster packs THREE and FOUR times above the MSRP. Meanwhile the big retailers take a cut free of the hassle of selling in-store. All for what is supposed to be a child’s hobby – how grumpy!
