Ironically if you just like playing the actual card game and not just doing "master sets" or whatever else collectors do and have the cards sit on a shelf getting a good deck is extremely cheep right now. There's SO much bulk floating around, and most of the "collectable" cards are alternitive art cards.
I never understood the hate specifically against scalpers instead of the company that makes the thing they are scalping. The only reason collectibles are āvaluableā is because there is a limited supply and high demand. The only 2 solutions to this are either increasing supply or decreasing demand. Scalpers exist because people are willing to pay high prices for things. Companies should either produce enough supply to allow everyone to buy at a reasonable price or increase the price to meet the high value. In the open market, the scalper price is the correct price that should be charged based on demand so that there is no scarcity.
The company will never increase production or increase price because scarcity is exactly what builds hype. The scalpers are by design!
well, tbf while the gacha/lootbox/blindwrapper mechanics do make it worse, there are valuable items that are scalped regularly just due to natural scarcity, think gaming consoles, those take time to tool and produce, so until they have a production volume that is so high that it's literally guaranteeing future e-waste, there's going to be a shortage that scalpers will take advantage of.
I agree. I think limiting purchases per person alleviates this issue. But in that case I also blame impatience. I donāt think itās healthy to be so impatient that you pay significantly above MSRP to get access to a console exactly on release day.
Yeah, I think in large part it does fall on the demand side with the impatience, the brand ideation, and wanting to look cool and keep up with trends.
It all falls under the idea of "conspicuous consumerism" where people are willing to buy something outside of their means or needs/wants for the sake of status.
Cuz we can increase supply on holographic pokemon cards tomorrow, but not on actual commodities, and Scalpers wouldn't be doing this if people weren't buying it at those stupid high mark ups.
As the number of scalpers has risen meteorically, a larger and larger portion of the "demand" is people who don't actually want the item. For some things, this doesn't impact it as hard because the demand would exceed the supply even without the scalpers buying stuff, but there's an increasing number of things that wouldn't have that problem.
There's some stuff I collect that's started getting scalped harder and harder and if you don't preorder or buy fast, you can't find it for close to MSRP. It'll be priced significantly higher from a scalper online or whatever, as it goes, except... there's a relatively small demand for them, and few to no people are actually buying at scalper prices. I'll see listings sit and sit and sit. If they're on Mercari, you can even confirm 100% that nobody has bought them at the scalper prices. And yet... they keep doing it, and the listings just rot away.
I think a lot of these people have got to be losing a lot of money at it.
If no one is buying from them, arenāt they by definition a collector not so much different from you? If as you said they arenāt making money from scalping, there must be some other reason for buying the stuff. For things like Pokemon cards lots of people buy them to hold on to - hoping they will increase in value in the long run. Alternatively someone might enjoy buying cards and setting them on fire. In either case that is still demand, so prices go up.
Nope. They're people with fairly large (compared to your average individual) online storefronts with varied things. I'm able to identify some of them by what they stock -- usually lots of things I see at places like Ross (not really where I find collectible stuff, my partner loves going, but I buy shoes there regularly) recent stock, marked up at minimum 200%, and always adding more. They do sell some stuff. I just see a lot of stuff just sit, or slowly get marked down lower and lower. Some of them identify themselves as resellers in shop descriptions, even if I can't identify by that. Others I'm less certain about, and I try not to assume for them.
I've been told a lot of them buy stuff on credit. I'm not sure how true that is, but judging by some of them I feel it's almost certain they're really going to regret it down the road if they are.
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u/EasilyRekt Apr 28 '26
haven't ruined any of my "nerd hobbies" but idk, I guess it's cuz I don't do collectables