by Doc – Owner, Founder, You Knew What I Was Going to Say In This Post Before You Even Clicked On It
I recently got a new job. Hooray for me! To celebrate, I paid a pilgrimage to my very small local TCG store and considered picking up some boosters from a few sets ago. Sealed Pokemon TCG products have been far above MSRP for years at this point, but I don’t mind spending twenty bucks where it used to be fifteen… occasionally. It’s been three months since I bought any Pokemon cards anyway, so it was a convenient excuse to get some.
I went in, greeted the cashier (his name’s Andrew) and made my way to the Pokemon cards. As one would expect, 30th Anniversary set boosters were retailing at $18/pack. That’s okay, these small stores need some markup to stay alive. I considered getting one before considering the ridiculousness of that kind of price. Hey, fair enough. Somebody else will get it. I moved to the 3-packs, which an employee informed me were only twenty dollars last week. I’d put them off at the time because I hadn’t signed the offer letter for the job yet (don’t count your chickens before they cluck), and had been hungry to get a cheap 3-pack for once.
They were $35 now.
I checked online. The going price for those on TCGPlayer is currently just under $20. If I were the kind of person who could say “Why no, that’s not too rich for my blood!” I’d certainly have picked them up. Yet they were too rich for my blood.
It was then that I, in a moment of desperation, debated whether to simply buy some recent booster packs online. Surely they’d be cheaper since they’re in full supply, right? Or at least their cards would be. And then I saw this:
Lord have mercy. This is three of the same card of Mew, and they’re all going for several months of rent payments. I’ve complained about the ridiculousness of the Pokemon TCG market on here before, and I plan to do it again until the market crashes and people get their heads screwed on straight. Just let it be known for future historians that I, Amiibo Doctor, thought this whole Pokemon market thing was stupid, overblown and not worth the money.
And that it’s probably downstream from the AI bubble in the markets, but I’ve talked about that already.
