In the past year, Pokemon cards have become a struggle to come across at stores. There are various reasons for the lack of cards but the main cause is scalpers.
Scalpers is a term used to describe people who buy out new products of collectables that are in high demand like Pokemon cards or limited time items. Then they sell the sealed items for a higher price on Ebay or similar sites.
The scalper problem has slowly elevated with packs being available for no longer than 2 hours and shown in rare cards dropping in price.
Scalpers usually flock to items that are in high demand and “anything that can be resold at a decent profit percentage,” said Chris Bordwell, owner of Black Dragon Games in Twin Falls. Black Dragon Games started as an online business and moved to a physical store ten years ago. The Black Dragon, as many call it, is located in the Turf Plaza.
Many people like to collect Pokemon cards because of the beautiful art of their favorite Pokemon, or to show off any expensive cards they have.
TCG(Trading Card Game) Player is a site used to buy specific cards or look up the price of a graded or ungraded card. Graded cards judge the condition of a card with ten being the best and one being the worst condition. Some people use the Price Charting site; both sites use recent sales of specific cards on Ebay to evaluate the average it’s sold at, then gives the data to players. That’s how people judge fair trades and selling prices by using the price data from the site.
The cards being sold come from normal collectors selling off their duplicates or vendors looking to acquire a little profit off a good card they got from a pack.
Every card community has resellers, but it only becomes a problem “when our normal customers can’t get that product,” said Bordwell.
Many mega stores like Gamestop, Target, and Walmart have put a limit of two to five packs an individual can buy per day. However, in many places like Twin Falls, the limits haven’t stopped Pokemon cards from selling out a couple hours after restock.
Facebook groups have been made to alert people of future drops or if a store has some product still, sometimes exposing spots where scalpers hide sealed products to buy at a later time.
“Most of the scalper types are just trying to make money. They’re not here for Pokemon. They’re not here for the hobby; not here for the community. They’re just here to buy cards and flip them for double what they paid,” said Dustin Strickland, head of the Pokemon Facebook group in the Magic Valley.
The community has been working together to expose scalpers, help others secure their hands on card packs or boxes with multiple packs, and encourage younger people to collect cards.
“Generally we know when restocks happen, and we can get there before the scalpers do. There’s a couple members who have held products that get their hands on products very often,” said Strickland.
Preventing the scalper problem is a group effort of the Pokemon community with people promoting “Having a nice community of non-scalper people,” said Strickland.
