Whenever there is a shortage of official merchandise for a popular franchise, like the expensive amiibo cards for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there are always tons of people online trying to make some money off of their stock of it. This has happened once again, but this time it's for Pikachu gummy candies.
It feels like Japan always gets the super cute Pokemon merchandise first, including the super expensive gigantamax plushies. Japanese company Kanro released a tropical Pikachu Pure Gumi candy for the market in Japan back in May. The company severely underestimated demand, however, and the candy is nearly impossible to find, in Japan or anywhere else. This has lead scalpers to charge ridiculous amounts on reselling websites similar to eBay.
Pikachu Tropical Flavor Pure Gumi candies are going for nearly 3000 yen on Japanese sites, which is about $30USD. Kanru advise their customers not to spend their hard-earned money on getting product from scalpers, but were unable to give a restock date for those who really wanted in on the Gumi trend.
Luckily for those who got their hands on these adorable gummy candies, they won't have to pay exorbitant prices that those without are having to pay to get their hands on them. There's just something extremely charming about the packaging, the candy, and the Pokemon, so it's easy to see why people want this little chubby Pikachu candy so much. Everyone loves a chubby Pikachu, even if Pokemon changed the fat version of Pikachu to make it easier to animate.
But this has been a massive problem over the years, and not just for Pokemon products. Between people reselling old amiibo for high prices and selling hard-to-find Nintendo Switches for inflated prices, to people trying to make tons of money off of hand sanitizer during a global pandemic, price gouging has been a problem forever. The only way to keep people from doing this type of thing is to not buy the products at such inflated prices, but sometimes that's the only way to get it.
It seems that no matter what people do in this kind of situation, they get the short end of the stick. While it can be hard to judge interest before a product is released, there should be better ways to combat price gouging on resell websites if everyone works together to stop it.
Source: Nintendo Soup