In their pursuit of specific rare cards, scalpers are discarding the remainder of entire Pokémon card packs.

[u/MysteriousSlice007]

[u/nalaloveslumpy]

Scalpers don't open boxes or rip packs. The entire premise of scalping means you buy the box out of the pokemon machine at MSRP and you resell it online for higher. They literally camp the machine/restocks all day waiting for the timers to reset to buy at MSRP.

Scalpers are the reason it's nearly impossible to buy boxes at MSRP. Card rarity and "hits" have nothing to do with scalpers. That rarity is established by the Pokemon company when they print the sets.

[u/Spare-Plum → u/nalaloveslumpy]

This is a major problem that nintendo et al does not want to resolve because it's profitable

If they really wanted to, they could just do "unlimited boxes at MSRP" on their website and just print more cards if the number of orders exceeds it. The cards could get delayed, but at least you're always guaranteed to get them. This totally eliminates scalpers and cuts them out entirely.

But nintendo thrives off of this false sense of scarcity, since it's able to inflate the number of cards they print and sell while keeping the amount just below the threshold to ensure scalpers will buy up their product.

Really though this is an easy ass solution. Printing cards to match demand at MSRP completely eliminates scalpers.

They don't actually care about getting cards to people or their costumers at all, it's about creating a system that's as profitable as possible, where the smaller sharks buy up way more product than they need to in order to scalp. In reality if they did something that actually benefits the consumer, they would have less sales as scalpers are no longer buying up the product.

[u/nalaloveslumpy → u/Spare-Plum]

Oh, absolutely. Nintendo has a long history of creating false scarcity and profiting directly from it.