Pokémon Card Fans Queue Through the Night to Beat Scalpers
Demand for Pokémon cards has surged to crypto-like fever, leaving genuine collectors lining up for hours while resellers drive up prices.
Devoted Pokémon card collectors are spending the night on London sidewalks just to secure the latest releases before scalpers can sweep them up, a sign of how intensely the trading-card market has tightened around new drops.
Outside Forbidden Planet, a pop culture retailer in central London, the queue stretched past five neighboring storefronts before the shop opened at 10am on a recent Friday. One fan, identified only as Kai, had arrived at 3am to hold his spot and estimated the line was roughly half genuine enthusiasts and half resellers looking to flip cards for profit.
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Kai described the hype surrounding Pokémon cards as comparable to cryptocurrency speculation — a market driven less by intrinsic play value and more by the expectation that prices will keep climbing. That dynamic is effectively pricing out younger or less committed fans who cannot afford to camp overnight or pay secondary-market premiums.
Forbidden Planet has implemented strict purchasing limits in an attempt to curb bulk buying by resellers, but the policy has only partially contained the problem. The scene outside the store reflects a broader pattern seen at card retailers across the United Kingdom and beyond, where limited print runs collide with outsized speculative appetite.
The tension between hobbyist collectors and profit-driven resellers has become a defining feature of the modern trading-card industry, raising questions about whether manufacturers can — or will — increase supply enough to cool a market that increasingly resembles a speculative asset class rather than a children's pastime. Continue reading at Business | The Guardian.
