Tyler Euchner and Maren Ewertz

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KCAU) — This holiday season, consumers are expected to spend roughly $900 per person on gifts, according to the National Retail Federation. However, some popular items, like trading cards, may be hard to come by. This is due to people purchasing products, like Pokémon Cards, and reselling them at higher costs.

If you had to guess, how much do you think an individual trading card can cost? Well, the answer is it can cost anywhere from a couple of cents to as high as hundreds of dollars, and that’s what scalpers are hoping for when purchasing in bulk.

“From a business standpoint, I can say that I understand it, right, but from a collector’s side point and a lover of the TCG (Trading Card Game) community and the games itself, it sucks to be quite frank,” said Spencer Martinez, the owner of The Hollow Archive, a trading card store in Cherokee, Iowa.

While scalpers aren’t a new concept, people have been reselling items like concert tickets for many years; it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that scalpers saw card games as a good investment.

“It’s gotten rough. I think right when COVID hit is when you started to see these scalpers kind of go crazy, because there is a platform online called TCG Player, there is Whatnot, all of these online places where people can make money without having to leave their home. Now, it does suck because it has not changed since COVID, unfortunately,” said Martinez.

Most of the time, scalpers will either buy bulk boxes of cards and resell those on places like eBay, or other times they’ll open packs and sell high-priced cards they pull online.

“Went to Target, and this was like before Target had the signs that said ‘two per customer’ and stuff like that, and I went with my nephew. He wanted to get a Pokémon set, and we go, and it was mid restock, and when I say I’ve never seen this in my life happen in person, a guy walked up with a shopping cart and just went *makes a gesture of a person taking their arm and sliding all the cards into a cart* and just grabbed everything.  And I tried to say, ‘Hey, can my nephew get one of those,’ like before. ‘No, I got here first.’ ‘No, I’m gonna buy ’em all.’ I had to go to three different stores to find him what he wanted,” said Martinez.

While many TCGs are bought and resold for higher prices, cards for Pokémon consistently see high demand.

“Pokémon card game has skyrocketed and been so, so saturated you can’t find stuff no more, and if you do, it’s way above market price,” said Martinez.

Generally, a box of Pokémon cards from Target would cost $50. However, getting your hands on one in a store is difficult, and they’re being resold on eBay for sometimes double their retail price.

Stores of all sizes are now trying to prevent scalpers from taking all of the products off the shelves, with Martinez emphasizing that trading cards are to be enjoyed by everyone.

“You need to make money as a business, but I want people to come in and know they can get what they want, and they’re not going to pay a crazy amount of money for it. I want people to be able to come in, collect open stuff they want to open, and just enjoy what it’s supposed to be,” said Martinez.

Whether you’re shopping for trading cards or other gifts this year, according to the National Retail Federation, 54% of people are planning to shop early this year to avoid the stress of last-minute shopping.

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