McDonald’s Pokémon Cards Sold Out Due to Scalpers

Scalpers take advantage of a McDonald’s loophole to pick up Pokémon packages for Happy Meals’ 25th birthday, then sell them online for exorbitant prices, leaving fans disappointed. their anger over the practice, in which boxes of Pokémon cards were posted on sites such as eBay, costing up to $ 1,500 for the water.

@McDonalds @Pokemon I sure hope you do some sort of inventory control for your promo Pokémon cards, as some of your inventory is sold in sealed boxes, which means they do not even pick it up in your stores. It also happened with Tim Hortons Hockey. Retail $ 1.99 pic.twitter.com/kX8qZyRX2V

– redphoenixsportscards (@redphoenixcards) February 9, 2021

Have you played Pokémon Trading Card Game?

YESNO

The limited edition packages, which are sold at select McDonald’s restaurants as part of the franchise’s birthday, are supposed to arrive as part of McDonald’s Happy Meals. According to the official announcement from the Pokemon website, Happy Meal buyers will receive a 25-year-old packaging card with four exclusive cards. There are 50 cards for fans to collect – all 24 starter Pokémon and Pikachu in standard and foil versions – but like other Pokémon packing cards, the ones you get are completely random. Buying McDonald’s Happy Meals should be the only way to collect them all, but scalpers circumvent it via a gap that allows them to buy the packets in bulk.

According to Kotaku, it seems that every McDonald’s restaurant has a different policy on how these packs are sold, making it possible for scalpers to get hold of them relatively easily. Some buy Happy Meals en masse to get the packets before throwing away the food. Others, meanwhile, simply show up at McDonald’s and ask to buy whole boxes, or arrive at 05:00 so they can buy parcels in front of anyone else.

By the nature of the matter, angry parents and other merchant fans took to Twitter to express their dismay at how the parcels are being sold. Clearly, there is only a certain amount of stock to go around, and that children and other ardent Pokémon fans are lacking – or even getting prizes – to obtain the cards for themselves.

Some Twitter users, including @ The3Composer, claimed that some McDonald’s stores limit people to five parcels at a time, but even these limits were only set after one scalper bought more than 450 parcels during a single visit.

My mom works at a McDonalds in southern Indiana, and her store is limited to selling only 5 packages per person per day because someone bought 3 suitcases (about 450 packages) at another store. That was all they had

– Jake Jacobson (@ Th3Composer) February 9, 2021

Many Twitter users have demanded that McDonald’s implement a large limit on how many packages one person can buy, but so far their efforts have fallen on deaf ears. We contacted McDonald’s for comment.

In other ‘extremely expensive’ Pokémon cards news, a box of original Pokémon TCG booster packs was recently sold for $ 400,000, and rapper Logic bought a single shiny Charizard for more than $ 200,000 last year.

Tom Power is a freelance writer in the UK. Follow him further Twitter.