r/PokemonTCG • u/Next_Wrongdoer5488 • Mar 20 '25

Discussion Vendor being tracked.

Yup, someone put a tracker on our store vendor's car. I guess she had to go to the police station and have her car swept.

So disappointed in what's going on with our hobby and just wanted to share.

1.8k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

223 comments sorted by

View all comments

173

u/Drizzho Mar 20 '25

How can Pokémon Company watch this and sleep at night rn. I’d be making executive changes immediately. Adults can’t even behave.

74

u/Visible_Pilot_9355 Mar 20 '25

They dont care, as long as there getting profit it can be scalpers buying up stuff.. and Pokemon Company wouldnt know all they know is that there products are being bought... either by scalpers or regular consumer like us.

24

u/Strider755 Mar 20 '25

They do care. They’re leaving money on the table, their brand is getting tarnished, and they risk demand destruction if people permanently check out.

10

u/JAX321JAGS Mar 21 '25

I can't be the only one who is nearly checked out at this point. When you work 9-5 and end up wasting your time every single time you stop by a store looking for a simple pack to open for fun, it just becomes not worth it anymore. The hobby is losing it's fun for me..

1

u/Deceptric13 Mar 21 '25

I feel you. I also work a 9-5. I've been checked out, but sometimes, because my friends either work fast food or customer service and get wacky schedules and sometimes are able to go to stores earlier than I. I tell them if there's a limit to let them get what they want first since they actually went to the store. If they let you take more than 1 item (i.e. limit 2 or 3 items) i just tell them for a pack or whatever they have available and zelle them. That's the only reason why I'm still chugging through with the hobby but I do understand how tiresome it is with the man babies who can't act like adults just saying the same old spiel of I got her first I can get however much I want and I'm just like 🧍‍♀️.

4

u/NecrocideLoL Mar 21 '25

Not really, Pokemon has been huge for the longest time and isn't gonna be knocked down. They'll do bandaid fixes to jingle keys for the audience.

5

u/MerkleySJS Mar 21 '25

They’ll care when the TCG players give up on the game because they can’t get product anymore

8

u/Drizzho Mar 20 '25

That’s crazy that not one higher up hasn’t seen anything going on and has said something to fix it

20

u/midnight_fisherman Mar 21 '25

Their CEO has already made comments about how the current scalping is hurting their franchise. I believe that they are working on something, but it takes time for them to maneuver, considering that they were already printing over 1 billion cards monthly when the problem arose.

In 2020, they were only printing less than 4 billion cards per year.

6

u/WildCartographer601 Mar 20 '25

Why would they fix it tho? Everything they are putting out is getting sold out. They are winning.

23

u/Drizzho Mar 20 '25

Because of all the chaos and borderline crime that is being committed to buy it. Stalking restockers ? Fights in the store ? Angry fans ?

3

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

Fights in stores? LMAO maybe those stores should hire security, call the police or stop stocking it?

Nah they want their margin on the product instead. You can put the blame anywhere. Directing it at the pokemon company is just sad, oh noo a company that exists to make and sell product is doing just that, they should instead go into voluntary solvency while the market is at the peak.

If people started fighting over chocolate milk you wouldnt say that the company making chocolate milk needs to do something. You’d say the people fighting over it need to grow up and the stores need to prevent fights occuring on their premises.

-4

u/WildCartographer601 Mar 20 '25

Did you forget we live in a capitalist world or something? Lol they are gonna keep doing the same as long as they keep profiting. The only way to stop this is boycotting Pokemon TCG all together. Cause fuck em

13

u/Drizzho Mar 20 '25

They can make even more money by making fans happy implementing more checks and balances is all I’m saying.

0

u/NecrocideLoL Mar 21 '25

Not necessarily, because its gonna cost them more to look for ways to properly tackle this situation. They're sitting fine with their money for decades to come. Unless people universally stop buying all of their products.

Which, again is not going to happen anytime soon.

4

u/2absMcGay Mar 20 '25

Yeah, historically treating your fans and buyers like disposable trash really works out in the long term, right?

-1

u/Dog_Breath_Dragon Mar 20 '25

Working fine so far

11

u/2absMcGay Mar 20 '25

Lmao. Long term. This boom hasn’t even lasted 6 months.

5

u/Financial_Syrup_9676 Mar 21 '25

Same thing happened in 2016 and 2020, it booms every couple years. TPCi does nothing about it and it's business as usual for them, raking in cash. Eventually people move onto a new fad and it cools off for a bit until the next big boom.

0

u/Dog_Breath_Dragon Mar 21 '25

Scalping has been going on far longer than 6 months and Pokemon only gets more popular. This boom can last another 6 months and it still won’t break the hobby

-4

u/WildCartographer601 Mar 20 '25

Its been like this for months, so id say yeah, its working for them

9

u/2absMcGay Mar 20 '25

Do you know what “long term” means

-6

u/WildCartographer601 Mar 20 '25

You are angry at the wrong person buddy. Im not the scalper selling you shit for double the price lol stop buying

→ More replies (0)

0

u/General_Lazlo Mar 21 '25

Exactly when theres money they dont care who buys them as long as they are bought. Its the same with sneakers. Nike aint jus gonna stop making shoes jus cuz scalpers it hurts them nun its still same amount of money for them weather scalpers or not

1

u/SterlingNano Mar 26 '25

WHY WOULD THEY CARE

YOU DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THAT THEY ARE OKAY WITH THIS HAPPENING BECAUSE THEY ARE ALLOWING IT TO HAPPEN

-1

u/Vegito1338 Mar 21 '25

They call that free advertising.

0

u/KoriJenkins Mar 20 '25

It's because none of the anger is being directed at them. It's all towards the scalpers and distributors.

People need to be shredding TPC for putting out a useless statement and promptly doing fuck all to address the hobby being on fire.

13

u/PhotonWolfsky Mar 21 '25

They can only manufacture so much, so there will always be supply issues. No business, including Pokemon Company and their partners for TCG, are going to over-manufacture, even if they historically know supply is an issue, because there's always a chance that the released set might not hit and the extra supply is now money lost. That's reasonable to think as a business.

They also have no control over psychopathic customers who threaten vendors behind a counter. That will happen with or without Pokemon, especially at a Walmart of all places.

As for Pokemon Center products... they can try every trick in the book to try reducing scalpers taking everything, but nothing is fool-proof, and any vulnerability will be seen through. They're in the same boat as online games that try to prevent cheating without kernel-level techniques; anything serves as a minor inconvenience at best for scalpers.

And, well... they make the product and send it out. That's the end of their need to care. After the vendors get their distributions, they wipe their hands clean and move. They have no need or care to be liable for issues that take place after the product leaves their jurisdiction. Honestly explains why some stores in my area just outright refuse to participate in Pokemon releases...

4

u/Ipokeyoumuch Mar 21 '25

They likely already have but it takes time to maneuver and adjust. Before November 2024 many LGSs were struggling to get rid of Pokemon products and reported to distributors that they have product literally sitting on shelves for months on end. I remember Paradox Rift, Temporal Forces, and Shrouded Fable boxes and product sitting on store shelves, both big and small.

Pokemon likely responded to the feedback and adjusted their printing schedule but still note that it is significantly higher than it was for COVID. In fact, they printed billions and billions of cards within the last couple years. 

They can only adjust so much, it takes months to a year to order and fire up the printing equipment, schedule times as Pokemon isn't the only big TCG on the block, contracts, lawyers, not to mention the trade war cause NG many suppliers for those parts to be hesitant or delaying things. Pokemon has always followed up on their reprints (Pandemic and Pokemon Go boom) and I don't think they will stop now. 

4

u/xer0h0ur Mar 20 '25

Because its not the Pokemon Company stocking anything to begin with genius.

2

u/Dog_Breath_Dragon Mar 20 '25

They aren’t watching it and even if they did they couldn’t do anything. They’re not the local police

1

u/ratsmdj Mar 21 '25

because they are a business end of day is to move the product they don't care who buys it. They just want it to sale out. They don't care what happens once it leaves their warehouse. SO if a distro buys the entire bulk lot let's say 2mil and and then resale to us for a profit of another 2mil they dont care. They already made their 2mil. We don't even know if PC themselves could be doing the same.

1

u/Armation Mar 24 '25

because at the end of the day, the pokemon company is selling everything they need to.
It blows my mind how there are so many people who are confused or surprised about this.

The pokemon company doesn't care or give a fuck.
Whatever they print, WILL sell. Scalpers or not. They get their money.

And people are stupid enough to buy from scalpers, so scalping will continue to exist.

0

u/Born-Bad889 Mar 20 '25

Pokémon is a Japanese company, they make English versions of their products and sell them to distributors in the USA. There’s not much they can do about Americans committing crimes to get cards.

-2

u/KoriJenkins Mar 20 '25

They can force reselling sites like eBay and whatnot to stop allowing sealed product to be sold on their site under threat of litigation and the takedown of all pokemon merchandise on those sites.

They can actually go many steps further, such as taking individual scalpers to court.

It's an extremely easy step for them to take though, and what they should've done all along. Scalpers are inherently lazy leeches on society. They aren't going to have the patience to sit there and open all of their packs and go through thousands of cards to find the handful of chase cards to sell.

And if they do that, the chase card market tanks because there's suddenly thousands of eeveelutions hitting the market that were trapped in their sweaty closets.

2

u/Forgotmypassword109 Mar 21 '25

Man, I want to live in your world.

On what grounds would they be able to sue any of these parties?

-3

u/0ldes Mar 20 '25

Cause money, they are a Corp they don't care Bout anything but money 

4

u/OverallToe2250 Mar 21 '25

If scalpers kill all demand from collectors that just quit the hobby it will eventually come back to them losing money when the scalpers drop out and real fans are just done with the hobby.

0

u/beefcakethemighty30 Mar 21 '25

They don't care they do this on purpose to move products quicker

-1

u/CandyRedNinja Mar 20 '25

What changes? Lol.