@McDonalds @Pokemon I hope you do some kind of inventory control for your promotional Pokémon cards, as part of your inventory is being sold in sealed boxes, which means they won’t even reach your stores. Although the same thing happened with Tim Hortons Hockey as well. Retail $ 1.99 pic.twitter.com/kX8qZyRX2V
– redphoenixsportscards (@redphoenixcards) February 9, 2021
The limited edition packages, which are being sold at selected McDonald’s restaurants as part of the franchise’s historic anniversary, should come as part of McDonald’s Happy Meals. According to the official announcement on the Pokémon website, Happy Meal buyers will receive a 25th anniversary collectible card booster that contains four exclusive cards. There are 50 cards for fans to collect – all 24 starting Pokémon and Pikachu in standard and foil versions – but, like other Pokémon collectible card packs, the ones you receive are entirely random. Buying McDonald’s Happy Meals should be the only way to collect them all, but money changers are getting around this, through a loophole that allows them to buy packages in bulk.
According to Kotaku, each McDonald’s restaurant appears to have a different policy on how these packages are sold, which allows money changers to get their hands on them relatively easily. Some are buying Happy Meals in bulk to pick up the packages before throwing the food away. Others, meanwhile, are simply showing up at McDonald’s and asking to buy whole boxes, or showing up at 5 am so they can buy packages before anyone else.Naturally, angry parents and other collectible card fans turned to Twitter to express their dismay at the way the packages are being sold. Clearly, there are only a certain number of shares to distribute, and children and other fervent Pokémon fans are losing – or even taking their price – out of purchasing the cards for themselves.
Some Twitter users, including @ The3Composer, claimed that some McDonald’s outlets are restricting people to five packs at a time, but even those limits were only set after a money changer bought more than 450 packs in a single visit.
My mom works at a McDonalds in southern Indiana, and her store only sells 5 packages per person per day, because someone bought 3 boxes (about 450 packages) from another store in the area, which was all they had
– Jake Jacobson (@ Th3Composer) February 9, 2021
Many Twitter users have demanded that McDonald’s implement a company-wide limit on how many packages a person can buy, but so far their efforts have not been heard. 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 UK based freelance writer. Follow him on Twitter.