McDonald's 'Pokémon' Cards End In Disaster And Food Waste
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Pokémon and McDonald’s collaborations are nothing new, but this recent collaboration put both into the limelight for reasons not expected by fans of Pokémon and the McDonald’s corporation. When the two partnered previously, packs of McDonalds-marked Pokémon TCG cards were included in the kids’ meals, a move that proved to be successful. This success brought forth an unforeseen result—scalpers and “fanatics” of Pokémon cards taking advantage of their “outlandish” popularity spiking during the past year to hoard the cards, making them “near impossible” to buy in stores. According to Kotaku.com, this double-sided success of the collaboration caused what was intended to be a three-day promotion to be cancelled.
Reports from Nintendo Soup through IGN stated McDonald’s orders were being emptied to receive their cards, only to leave dozens of food orders untouched and abandoned. Customers were described as “ignoring the chain's limit of five meals per person”, and piles of bags lay untouched as Happy Meals were dumped by the side of the road. One incident included the police being called when one purchaser discovered the Pokémon cards had run out.
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Image Source: videogameschronicle.com
A statement from McDonald’s Japan responded with,
“We would like to inform you that the distribution of Pokémon cards to customers who purchased Happy Meals® Pokémon, which was scheduled for three days only from Saturday, August 9th to Monday, August 11th [national holiday], has ended at many stores due to higher-than-expected sales….Please refrain from contacting stores regarding stock availability.”
While apologies from McDonald’s Japan about not being able to meet customer demands were made, a major problem with the promotion was the hunt for a bespoke Pikachu. Scalpers were especially greedy in their hunt for this Pikachu card, disregarding their social media posts about buying dozens of bags worth of food only to abandon the bags on doorways and sidewalks. On the other side of social media, people are calling for McDonald’s to enforce “stricter checks” when selling Happy Meals in the future, and limit of just one purchase per customer to cut back on further scalping and waste. Talk of “stricter checks” has yet to be discussed, but Pokémon fans and McDonald’s consumers are not at fault for being victims of scalpers. Yet, their love for Pokémon and community unites them against the darker aspects of human nature and greed.
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Sources: kotaku.com, IGN
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