McDonald's Pokémon Card Inventory Gobbled Up by Scalpers

Pokémon fever has once again swept the North America region. This time, the frenzy over Pokémon comes thanks to a collaboration with McDonald’s restaurants. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Pokémon franchise, the fast-food chain is currently selling Pokémon booster packs in its Happy Meals, which are meant for children. Each pack contains four random cards with a total of 50 unique cards to collect, and some cards are more rare than others.

However, children and their income-possessing parents aren’t the only ones hunting down Pikachu and his friends at the home of the golden arches. As reported by Kotaku, adult YouTubers and influencers have jumped into the mix to produce content for their fans, like Blazendary Pokemon. He purchased 20 Happy Meals to get his hands on the coveted cards. You can see him opening the packs in this video.

Because of the incredible demand and limited supply of these card packs, scalpers have also sniffed opportunity in the air. IGN reports that some scalpers have found a loophole that allowed them to swipe up entire full cases of the cards at some McDonald’s restaurants. Without needing to purchase any Happy Meals.

It seems that there was not a uniform policy in place at all participating McDonald’s when it came to how the packs could be purchased. So scalpers were able to purchase cases of packs by themselves, unaccompanied by any food. For example, Twitter user @Th3Composer tweeted, “My mom works at a McDonalds in southern Indiana, and her store is limited to only selling 5 packs per person per day, because someone bought 3 cases (around 450~ packs) from another area store, which was all they had”

Scalpers are now trying to sell these full cases on eBay at exorbitant prices. One listing for a case is posted at $1,500!

As expected, parents hoping to satisfy their Pokémon-loving children are outraged that McDonald’s has allowed this to happen, leaving them unable to purchase any Pokémon cards. The McDonald’s company has released this official statement:

"We love seeing fans’ passion for our limited-time Happy Meal promotion celebrating 25 years of Pokemon. With such significant demand for our promotional Pokemon TCG cards, and some fans even going to extreme lengths to get them, we’re working quickly to address shortages and also strongly encouraging restaurants to set a reasonable limit on Happy Meals sold per customer. We want to offer the full Happy Meal experience to as many families as possible, and help ensure everyone is able to get in on the fun!”

(image source: Amazon)