Remember earlier this year when The Pokémon Company announced that it would be teaming up with McDonald's to put special Pokémon toys and cards into Happy Meals as part of the series' 25th anniversary celebrations? Remember how we all thought that was a lovely and pure thing that nobody could possibly find a way to ruin? Well, here come the scalpers.
I suppose we should have seen it coming, because people can be truly awful and desperately greedy quite a lot of the time. And by people, I mean scalpers, obviously.
As you're probably aware, the current Pokémon X Happy Meal promotion comes with the chance to get any one of 50 collectible cards, including a few super rare holographic cards. Even if you've been out of the collecting game for a while, you can probably appreciate that people still go bananas for Pokémon cards. Classic packs go for silly money at auctions, and many claim it's becoming increasingly difficult to obtain booster packs at retailers.
Advert
All of which means, sadly, that these McDonald's Happy Meals are being snapped up - not by the small children that they're so clearly meant for - but by the opportunistic collectors and scalpers who care about profiting from the cards rather than playing with them. Ugh. Seriously, ugh.
As reported by Polygon, things got gross quickly. Scalpers are waking up early to stake out restaurants and get the jump on those stupid kids who clearly don't care enough about Pokémon to be in the city at 6am. Others are mass-buying Happy Meals to get all the collectibles and then just tossing the food away, which is a disgusting thing to do at the best of times, let alone during a goddamn pandemic. Some warm-hearted chums of humanity are even selling entire boxes of these cards over on eBay. It's not clear if these sealed packs are being sold on by employees, but it doesn't look great.
Advert
It's at this point I should stress that you might see adults walking out of a McDonald's with a few of these Happy Meals in hand, and that's okay. Even if they don't have kids, it could just be that they like Pokémon and want some new cards. I know I'm super into the idea of the promotion. The problem, as is the case with PlayStation 5 consoles right now, is that there are people buying up far more than they need so they can make a profit, leaving nothing for the rest of us.
Scalpers, and I cannot stress this enough, are the worst. Here's hoping that touted government action against them here in the UK takes hold sooner rather than later, eh?
Featured Image Credit: Nintendo/McDonald's
