Patron Question: Where are Pokemon buyers going as prices rise?

追加: 2026-05-22

[00:00:02]Guys, what is up? So, a lot going on at the store today. I have a couple of questions from a patron and I'm going to read these one at a time and talk about them and answer them and kind of try to put it in the context that I understand his questions and try to give you some good answers for them. So, the first one is, do regular customers buy Pokemon packs or booster boxes at your store at current market prices or close to? And so when it comes to current market prices, I'm going to assume that he means TCG market prices, TCG player market prices, because that really is the best indication of a nationwide market price. It's the most fluid and highest velocity uh market that we have in the US. So, yes, customers in my store, they buy Pokemon packs, they buy Pokemon booster boxes, they buy ETBs, they buy Vboxes and collections and all all the rest of it, tins and everything else. They buy it at close to market price, they buy it at market price, and they buy it over market price. And the thing that I always try to emphasize in these discussions is that when the customer is standing there in the card store, they are feet from the product.

[00:01:17]Sometimes they are less than a foot from the product depending on how they are resting their hands on the counter and if the product is in the display case.

[00:01:27]And so asking a customer to pay close to or at or over market price in order to bridge that last foot of distance between them and the product is not a big ask. Most people by the time they already come and drive down to the card store and they come in, they talk for a while and they visit and you know catch up with how they've been and everything else and talk about the new products and what they're into and all the rest of it. and then it gets around to, oh, I'm going to buy something. Well, they don't really mind paying a couple extra dollars. And I know that seems a bit weird to most of us here watching Final Trade because most of us come from the TCG investing side. We come from that background. And on the more businessoriented side of all of this, yes, we do whatever we can to save every dollar possible. And if we can save 1% by selecting slow shipping from Amazon, we do that. If we can save several percent by buying at marketplace on TCG player and then getting 3% infinite cash back and 3% PayPal cash back. Heck yeah, we're going to do that. But most buyers are not like us. We are the weirdos who sit over here in this like far off edge space at the corner of the ecosystem of TCGs. And so we are the ones who will go through all those hoops to save a couple dollars. But your average buyer in the TCG ecosystem, once he's at the card store, if he's even aware of what the current market prices, which is difficult for me to stay aware of, then if you're selling it for one, two, $3 more, 5, 10, 15% more, they're not really going to care because most shippers on TCG player are slow as balls. Most of them are going to take most of them are going to take three to five sometimes seven days simply to drop your package in the mailbox and then it's going to have to come through USPS most of the time and it's going to take overall 8 10 12 days for you to get your package if you order it off TCG player or you can get the product right now. And so, yes, customers will buy the Pokemon products, they'll buy the Magic products, they'll buy One Piece, they'll buy every single product in this store, close to market, at market, above market, because again, it's about convenience. It's about timeliness. It's about having the product in your hand right now. Okay?

[00:04:08]So, uh, understand that we're the weird ones and we're the ones who will jump through every hoop available in order to save one, two, three, 4%. even if it delays getting a product for weeks because ultimately we don't care. Most of us are here for the TCG investing aspect and holding the product for the long term is what we intend to do from the start. And so yeah, if uh if it takes longer to ship, well, big deal. I wasn't going to sell it for years anyway. I don't care when I get it. So that would be my answer to the first part of the question is that the price elasticity is uh pretty high. So you can change the price a lot and the demand does not change much. Okay. So, the second part of this patron's question will read, "Seems like as prices rise, consumer spending shifts from booster boxes to mystery PSA slabs or ripen ships, and the people selling those are the ones buying product at market prices to get enough supply to resale quick."

[00:05:13]So, I believe what the gentleman is implying is that as the prices of Pokemon product have gone up over the last, let's say, 18 months since Pokemon really lost the ability to put any downward pressure on the market via reprints. Since then, I think he believes that most of the buyers buying at the market price are doing, you know, short-term flips, things like that. Uh, doing kind of the mystery bags, the rip and ships and stuff like that. And what I'll say is at least a little bit of that is correct. So in some of my dealings on TCG Player with the various accounts that I run on there, yeah, I get orders from people for sealed products typically of magic, but you know, when it's when it's an order from Bob's Ripen Ship or Job's ripen ship or Raul's rip and ship, well, yeah, I mean, it's people buying at market price and selling it through a ripen ship. And you know, uh, rip and ships are mostly going to be getting their products at market price. Now, I'm sure there are some that are associated with card stores or have deals with card store owners to get stuff at advantageous prices if they move certain volumes or whatever else or maybe have their own card store and distribution access and or any of other ways to get a product besides strictly market price. Um the other part though is we can't know an exact answer to this question. And so to the extent that buying behavior changes as the price goes up, well some buyers are simply pushed out of the market. Some of them who don't have a huge attachment to this and just do it as a casual hobby, you know, maybe they say, "Well, Pokemon cards are just too expensive. I'll never complete a Destin Rival set. You know what? I'm gonna get back into rock climbing for a while or get back into fishing or you know whatever else people do. Um, some of them will shift to other products, but the mix is something that would be very very difficult to measure because you would have to somehow devise a survey method and you'd have to measure at different points in time and then measure after prices move in certain directions and be able to uniquely identify respondents and see how their behavior changed. And then you could start to say things like, well, um, when prices rose 30% over the course of six months, this many of this type moved to these products, this many of this type went away. This many of this type just paid the extra money, you know, and so I I know from talking with some of my customers here in the card store, yes, there are people who are interested in the ripping ships. are interested in, you know, the more gambling aspects of this, even more gambling than just opening booster packs, but the ripening ships where you expose yourself to all kinds of fraud and scams and everything else. But if they really enjoy the gambling aspect of all of this, then yeah, they'll definitely go in for that. even in addition to just coming into my store still and regularly buying packs, buying decks, participating in events, coming in and playing everything else. And so sometimes you might see that uh maybe rip and ship catches on, but maybe because in the last couple of years it's kind of been a newish thing. You know, I'm sure I'm sure somebody was doing rip and ship 10 years ago, but it's really become a big deal in the last probably three, four, five years. And more recently, as Pokemon gets more and more expensive, it gets harder and harder to get. Well, there will be some segment of the buying population that says, you know, I haven't bought a lot of Pokemon in a while, but oh my goodness, I just got, you know, some notification that there's a ripen ship going live, and they have some set I'm interested in, and hey, why not? I just got paid. I'll I'll pay, you know, whatever price for these packs through a ripen ship. So uh partially yes rip and ships are generally though not nearly always buying at market prices in order to get product for their services. But as to trying to say that uh customers will generally move from buying packs and buying boxes over to using ripen ships as the price goes higher. um the customer is not saving any money by doing that. If the prices have gone higher and he has to go to a rip and ship that's going to also be of buying from most of the same sources that average buyers are buying at an additional fee for the service of the rip and ship. Well, uh they're not going to save any money by doing that. And again, it introduces all the unbelievable amount of risk of uh fraud and everything else associated with ripet ship. So, um I don't think there's a good correlation to make there. And again, what what I see is people are not really that concerned with the price once they are in the card store. They're not that concerned with it. And so, they'll pay one, two, three extra bucks for a booster pack. they'll pay 10 15% higher for a booster box. They don't really care once they see that the product is right in front of them. Now, I do occasionally get someone who comes into the store. I would say once every couple of weeks, I get a buyer who comes in and from conversing with them, you can tell they are a very, very dialed in um highly infranchised buyer. They're the kind of people that, you know, we basically they're like us. They're the ones who follow the market closely, who have pretty good mental model of what the prices are doing. They generally know what the ballpark best price they can get for individual items or at least classes of items, what the best prices are. And so when they come in, you know, they'll talk and they'll you you'll pick things up from conversation with them and the way they talk about things and what they say. And you know, you get one of those in here every couple of weeks in the store. Typically, they don't buy anything. And typically, you never see them again because they know that, well, I can get 2% better price if I wait a week and a half to get it shipped from TCG Player. And, you know, for some of those kind of buyers, it's worth it. but they are in the vast vast minority of buyers. Most of the time people come into the store, they're excited, they've got this great, clean, nice smelling store and you know, I'm talking to them and they're having fun and they buy and they rip and they buy and they rip and they buy and they rip and then they come back again later that week and they buy and rip more. And so don't project too much of your own uh sensitivity to price onto the entire market because we are the weird minority, not the whole rest of the market. So uh that's what I would say to that.

[00:12:35]Let me know what you think, guys. Thanks to everyone who makes this content possible, especially my very generous supporters on Patreon who get to ask me questions and actually get an answer.

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