There is supposedly “corruption” in the trading cards market. Corruption is defined as “dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery” which sounds about right if the reports people are posting are true. I have no reason to doubt that they are true, but like always take everything with a grain of salt.
The reports of dishonest behavior started with the scarce availability of Prismatic Evolutions products. Suddenly, with that scarcity, everyone was out for profit. Prismatic Evolutions products were being sold for significantly more than MSRP and even now with an increase in availability Prismatic Evolutions products still sell for more than MSRP.
This has created significant incentive for people to scalp product… which is exactly what has happened. Scalpers have and will continue to purchase all of the Pokemon product that they can get their hands on. We’re long past Prismatic Evolutions being the only product scalped, with scalpers now targeting virtually every single product available. My GameStop for example has sold out of every single restock of Pokemon cards they’ve gotten. Your average collector can’t purchase anything. All that I can find locally at MSRP is Silver Tempest checkout lane boosters which is kind of sad.
I would like to mention now that again, these are rumors of dishonest behavior. Actual proof is scarce and we’re supposed to be generous towards those being accused of inappropriate behavior.
There have been a multitude of reports of “backdoor” dealing, where an employee holds back Pokemon stock to then sell privately for above MSRP instead of letting Pokemon products hit the sales floor. Employees are basically taking bribes to give scalpers product. There have been a bunch of stories of this across multiple retailers.
There have also been a number of reports concerning shelf stockers for card vendors either purchasing product themselves or informing people they know of when and where to get product. For some reason Walmart’s name keeps popping up with this practice.
There’s also the case of vendors possibly holding product back from store shelves so they can then sell it for above MSRP.
Ultimately some shady stuff seems to be going down when it comes to Pokemon products. Retail employees, vendors, and stockers all seem to be behaving badly. It’s all anecdotal and I’m not going to link to the first hand reports because they don’t need random people getting up in their business or to get in trouble with their employers.
I’m not sure what The Pokemon Company can actually do about this shady behavior except send a letter to distributors / vendors and that doesn’t seem like it’d work. I mean, do you really think a letter from them is going to stop dishonest behavior from every single distributor and their employees? Nope. The best thing I can think of is refusing to send product to distributors, but that’s a double edged sword for The Pokemon Company and I’m thinking they wouldn’t want the loss of revenue in the American market.
So if you were wondering where all of the Pokemon products have gone, they may have been sold by managers out the backdoor for a nice bribe.