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Competing retailers of trading card games are banding together to fight back against a rash of burglaries targeting a product in curiously high demand: Pokémon cards.
Postmedia spoke to eight Edmonton sellers of collectible Pokémon cards and similar games who’ve together reported more than a dozen incidents in 2022. While their accounts date the trend to shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems to have picked up steam with several stores reporting multiple smash-and-grab heists at their locations last year.
It was a heavy hit to the business, but not the fatal blow.
“The last break-in was so bad that I had no stock left to sell,” he said, referring to a February 2022 burglary that saw the store lose $80,000 worth of goods. “At that point I just threw in the towel.”
With little hope for police alone recovering their cards, which are generally untraceable as a factory-sealed and ungraded product, sellers said they’ve kept close contact with each other, communicating and co-ordinating behind the scenes to itemize, identify and investigate the reappearance of their stolen goods in the market.
‘They grabbed him’
About a week after the second burglary at Thunder Ground, Reid said he received a call from Taps Games, a few kilometres southwest on Calgary Trail and 28 Avenue, where staff clocked a man trying to sell some of his cards.
Taps Games co-owner Chris Larsson said his own store had been hit twice as well, once in May for about $7,000 in product, then again in October to the tune of $50,000. Business partner Brian Tews said the second incident involved several display cases with higher-value cards worthy anywhere from $30 to $600 a pop.
“We held on to the collection and told him to come back in a couple hours after we went through it,” Larsson said of the suspicious seller. “We did call police, they did show up and, when he came to collect his money, they grabbed him.”
“It felt good to finally get somebody,” Tews added.
Edmonton police were unable to verify their version of events before publication, and couldn’t comment on the trend without more time to analyze relevant crime data.
Reid said he recovered about $1,500 worth of product in the sting, but little comfort given the depth of his loss. Apparently it didn’t do much to deter later thefts either, not least for the next business in the space.
When Training Grounds shuttered, a similar enterprise called Top Deck Games took its place and scheduled a launch for the following May, when a pair of burglaries a few days apart bookended the grand opening, derailing some of the new owner’s own business ambitions.
“I planned to expand in a couple of different areas in trading-card games,” proprietor Bradley Schroeder said. “But due to the break-ins I’ve had to spend most of those funds just recovering and trying to stay on my feet.”
While the first burglary targeted Pokémon cards, the second focused more on another trading card game called Magic: The Gathering, Schroeder said. Several owners described the latter as a fantasy game where cards are generally more valuable, but also more niche than the Pokemon pop-culture phenomenon.
‘The criminal element knows’
Based on a mid-1990s video game where players catch and battle “pocket monsters” for which the franchise owes its name, the Pokémon brand has spun off a cartoon series, movies, and merchandise including trading cards.
Several Edmonton retailers flagged the onset of the pandemic as a turning point for the collectible card game, when old and new customers found themselves with more time and money to indulge amid stay-at-home orders and emergency benefit payments.
Compared to 2020 when the Pokémon Company shipped more than 30.4 billion cards, that figure climbed a little over 12 per cent to over 34.1 billion cards in 2021 before jumping another 26 per cent to over 43.2 billion cards in 2022.
The Edmonton retailers also credited the meteoric rise in interest to social media influencers such as Logan Paul, whose online stunts during the pandemic focused the product in the public eye.
A Youtube personality who started purchasing vintage, sealed box sets of Pokémon card packs for upwards of US$300,000, Paul has opened the boxes live and auctioned individual packets for as much as US$1 million each, which had a ripple effect on the market. (He also admitted to paying $3.5 million in December 2021 for a purportedly rare case that turned out to be G.I. Joe cards.)
Mike Lewis, a manager at Warp 2 Comics and Games on 97 Street and 128 Avenue, said those factors preceded the string of burglaries from which no store seems to be safe.
“The criminal element knows very much about it now,” he said. “At one point, we used to get about three or four very sketchy guys come in every day trying to sell us stuff with Walmart stickers still priced on the cards.”
As an older store running for more than 20 years, Warp 2 is “fortified to the gills,” but has still seen several break-in attempts that prompted the installation of window shutters, he said.
‘We love the game’
Edmonton police Sgt. Aubrey Zalaski told Postmedia that criminals determined to break in will often make the attempt, and the onus is on businesses to install security measures that slow their progress.
While nearly all the stores Postmedia consulted had some form of security in place (and more after the break-ins) Zalaski also said businesses can learn more tactics from police through an audit for crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) such as strategic camera placement and merchandise storage.
Hoping to prevent break-ins altogether, one retailer opted to keep Pokémon cards off his shelves entirely.
Jason Wynn of Hobz, on 50 Street and 74 Avenue, said he refuses to stock the product after the store’s previous incarnation (Apt to Game in southwest Edmonton’s Pleasantview neighbourhood) was robbed of $11,000 in product in January 2022, and again for roughly $5,000 of merchandise in November.
He attributes the lower losses in the second incident to carrying fewer Pokémon cards after the first burglary.
“Apparently we had enough that it didn’t matter,” he said. “What hurts more is being robbed. We can make $10,000 in profit in Pokémon cards in six months, or we can lose $10,000 being robbed.”
For Reid, the solution to a future endeavour would likely involve a virtual storefront that criminals can’t crack, he said.
But his successor in the space still sees value in maintaining brick-and-mortar stores, which often serve as event spaces for games and a hub for the community.
While much of the recent attention around the game focuses on high-value cards, Schroeder said most of the cards sold in-store are worth less than people think.
“We opened up our shops because we love the game,” he said, “not because they make millions of dollars.”
Source: EdmontonJournal
