So here's a thing that happens: An adult wakes up at 5:45 in the morning to stand outside a Target. They're not alone, the line at this time is 30 deep already. You may be thinking this is for food or medicine or something, but no it's for a cardboard box with a picture of what looks like an electric mouse on it. You think to yourself, "Well those are some idiots." Then you come to find out that the box is worth almost a month's rent, but that shouldn't change your opinion on them because they're still idiots and are ruining everything.

Now, people like to think this reselling business is new, like it started with sneakers or with Pokemon, but no, this goes back further, back to video games, which is a little sad if you think about it, because video games are meant for children and here we've got grown adults treating a gaming console like it's the last helicopter out of a war zone. See, the PlayStation 1 did great, so Sony figured, why not make the PlayStation 2 and then just not make enough of them. Real simple plan. And it worked, because scarcity always works, that's like rule one of getting people to want something, just don't give it to them. Over in Japan, scalpers were selling these consoles for eleven thousand dollars. Eleven thousand. For a machine that plays video games and, at the time, DVDs, which I guess was a big deal. Meanwhile in America, a console that cost three hundred bucks was going for fifteen hundred on eBay within hours of coming out. That's the whole story right there, really. Everything else in this article is just that same story wearing a different hat.

But if you want to go back to the real beginning, the granddaddy of it all, you gotta go back to Beanie Babies, which I think about more than a normal person should. Ty Warner starts making these little bean bag animals back in 1993. Nothing crazy. Just stuffed animals. But he does two things that, whether he meant to or not, changed the world forever. First, he only makes 36 of any one animal. Second, he starts "retiring" them. And that's it, that's the whole trick, artificial scarcity, and it worked on the whole country for seven straight years. People spent five hundred million dollars on stuffed animals in a single month. Half a billion dollars. On beanbags. And now, today, those same Beanie Babies can't fetch a dollar on eBay. So somewhere out there is a grown adult with a closet full of stuffed animals worth exactly nothing.

Then sneakers came along, and sneakers, to their credit, at least tried to look respectable about it. They built a whole fake stock market, called it StockX, launched it out of Detroit in 2016. Bids, asks, live pricing, the whole nine yards, like it was the floor of the stock exchange, except instead of trading shares of some oil company you're trading a shoe. And it worked great, until, and this'll shock you, the thing that goes up came back down. Prices dropped 7% in 2022. One shoe that used to go for $350 is now going for $183. You can also see how the sneaker market is dead because look at Nike the past few months, stock dropped 78% from its 2021 peak and removed from the S&P 100.

Around this same time, a company called Supreme figured out you could sell people a literal brick with their logo stamped on it. The brick retailed for a ridiculous $30 and sold out in a day, then popped up on eBay for as much as $1,000. If you're trying to do the math, to have an average sized house built out of Supreme bricks would cost you $4.7 million dollars. Unsurprisingly though the hype of Supreme is dead. VF Corp, the company that owns Vans and The North Face, bought Supreme in 2020 for $2.1 billion dollars. By 2024, VF Corp just sold Supreme off to an EssilorLuxottica (ya the eyeglass monopoly) for $1.5 billion, a loss of $600 million dollars in 4 years. 

And then Labubu showed up and did the whole cycle again, but in fast forward. Pop Mart's stock dropped over 60%, erasing $33 billion. All it took was the company expanding into physical retail with nothing more than a rare doll that they decided to make more of because the chart needs to go up and to the right. Sounds familiar? It is and it's really weird that no one at the company could have predicted that.

There is a silver lining in all this though because it seems like slowly the resellers are getting ruined. The same person who buys the whole stock of something are now online complaining that nobody wants to buy it from them for the exorbitant prices. This is evident in sneakers because you'll come by videos online everyday of sneaker resell store owners saying the sneakers are dead, but their reason is because they cant sell what they have. Lacking self awareness they basically caused this by buying up all the stock, watching the price shoot up, and then act shocked when it all comes crashing down. Guess "I bought everything so now you have to pay me" was never actually a lasting business.

Which brings us to Pokemon, the one everybody swears is different this time. And maybe it is, a little. Nobody's printing 1999 again, that much is true, and there's a decent argument out there that a card which has already survived thirty years of this nonsense might outlast the dollar itself. Could be. I'm not an economist, I just write articles that no one reads. Shop owners who sell cards are noticing the Pokémon crowd quietly thinning out, on account of when people can't buy the thing at a normal price, a lot of them just stop trying. And that, if you think about it, is how this always ends. Not some big crash on the news. Just a kid, somewhere, who quietly decides this isn't for them anymore, and goes and finds something else to love that the grown ups haven't gotten to yet.