Earlier this week, McDonald’s started a new promotion to celebrate the Pokémon franchise’s 25th anniversary. For a limited time, fans can receive TCG packages within Happy Meals or as a separate purchase at participating locations. Unfortunately, Pokémon cards are quite popular at the moment, and resellers are buying promotional cards. There have even been auctions for whole boxes of cards on eBay! Following the previous ComicBook.com article on the situation, McDonald’s contacted us with a statement about their plans to ensure that fans can enjoy the current promotion. This statement can be found below.
“We love to see the passion of fans for our limited-time Happy Meal promotion, celebrating 25 years of Pokémon. With such a significant demand for our Pokémon TCG promotional cards, and some fans going to extreme lengths to get them, we are working quickly to address scarcity and also strongly encourage 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 can join in the fun! ”
According to McDonald’s, individual restaurants can decide whether or not to sell à la carte toys, but it is the company’s policy not to sell Happy Meal toy boxes. The company also does not tolerate the resale of toys through what it calls “unauthorized channels”. Instead, it believes that cards should be offered exclusively through the promotion.
Some stores already seem to have placed limits on the number of toys that can be offered to each customer, with many customers limiting it to four or five. With the company encouraging stores to place this type of restriction, it will be interesting to see whether or not it will prevent some retailers from catching them before fans can.
For those unfamiliar with the promotion, McDonald’s Happy Meals is currently offering 25 Pokémon cards celebrating the franchise’s history. The cards are offered in blind packs of four, although each card also has a hologram variant. TCG packages are accompanied by additional items such as cardboard boxes, stickers and more.
Did you get any Pokémon cards from McDonald’s during the promotion? Did you notice any restaurant that ran out of cards? Let us know in the comments or share directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk about games!