Scalping is by no means a new problem, but it has become noticeably more notorious over the last few months. Scalpers took advantage of the limited releases of the hot new consoles - the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S - and bought them in droves in order to sell them for a profit (a problem that is still ongoing) and now they've begun targeting the special McDonald's Pokemon cards.
As a reminder, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Pokemon franchise. As part of the celebrations, McDonald's has released a range of special collectible cards depicting mascot Pikachu and all of the starter Pokemon that can be used in the trading card game and are bundled with Happy Meals.
While they offer no gameplay benefits, the cards are obviously unique and make for collectors items popular with fans young and old, so it's unsurprising (but still disappointing) to see scalpers use it as an opportunity to deprive everyone else these otherwise easy to access items unless they pay obscene prices. Naturally, disgruntled fans and parents have taken to social media to complain and ask McDonald's to prevent this from continuing.
Apparently, each McDonald's restaurant has a different policy on how the card packs are sold, meaning some people have been able to buy Happy Meals in bulk so as to better guarantee the number of unique cards they contain. The cards are distributed randomly, obviously to encourage repeated visits to collect them all.
So far, McDonald's doesn't appear to have commented on the situation or enforced a plan to limit how many cards a single person can obtain at once. However, it sounds like some individual restaurants have begun to take measures. One Twitter user says that the McDonald's where their mom works is limiting five packs per person per day after somebody was able to acquire roughly 450 packs from another McDonald's, which was their entire stock.
It's upsetting to see the franchise's anniversary already being soured so early in the year. This also follows recent news that the Pokemon World Championships have been canceled for the second year in a row due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, though it's already been rescheduled to take place in 2022.
Scalping has become such a serious issue now that even governments are getting involved. To be more specific, Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom are pushing to have the act of gaming hardware scalping be made illegal.