[ad_1]
A report from Vice opened my eyes to the sheer scale of the Pokémon collectible card collection market – apparently to the point where card rating companies have wait lists ranging from six to ten months, a company claiming they received over 500,000 note cards. per week. Card evaluators, who assess the conditions of collectible cards to determine how collectable (and therefore valuable) they are, are so overwhelmed that people who want to have their Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, or sports cards evaluated should also expect. line (or pay the nose to ignore it).
A card rating company apparently needed employees so badly that they offered $ 1,000 severance bonuses – then pushed them to $ 2,500. Another company had to buy of them warehouses to store all the cards he entered. Apparently, even the most basic original Pokémon cards can fetch over $ 40 now in excellent condition, and rated cards can be worth up to 20 times their value in perfect condition.
Of course, we’ve seen the boom affect the market in other ways as well: eBay is adding a feature to its app specifically to scan cards and pre-populate listings with information (but not card status), this which slightly speeds up the sale. them. the Vice The report also mentions that plastic card protectors sell out completely.
Most of these effects seem to be related to old Pokémon cards, as they are the ones that are rare – as the author of the Vice The article points out, people are looking to see if they have any that escaped the ravages of being childhood toys after seeing collectors like Logan Paul buying original cards or packs at extremely high prices.
But it also appears that some of the OG Pokémon sparkle has started to affect the market for new collectibles of unproven value: Some Target stores have threatened to call the police on people camping outside to new Pokémon card replenishments, and the Pokémon card company rushed to pump out as many new cards as possible.
Maybe the pandemic has awakened people’s inner magpies, triggering an insatiable desire to collect without really considering the value of what we are buying (just look at NFTs, which feel like collectable peaks). Of course, there are also those really rare Pokémon cards which are very valuable – but it can’t just be the rare cards hitting these card rating companies with, as one CEO put it, “an avalanche. of cardboard ”.
Honestly, seeing this news, on top of everything else, left me with a burning question: where the Damn Are people making so much money that they can spend $ 660K on a Mario cartridge or $ 300K on a Pokemon card?
[ad_2]
Source link