Eddie interviews a Pokemon card scalper on The Dog Walk

Eddie has made a habit of bringing regular people with unusual jobs onto The Dog Walk. This time it is the guy you blame when the card aisle at Target is empty.

Eddie

@EddieBarstool

I talked to a Pokemon scalper Found it interesting how the whole process works and how he feels about what he does

The captions alone give away the business model. He talks about buying stock out and then flipping it a few months down the road, and says you might not even have the product in your hands yet when it sells. So the scalping is not only a guy with a cart full of booster boxes. He can be selling inventory he has not received. The show framed the whole segment around one question: do scalpers feel any remorse? Eddie said he wanted to hear how the process works and how the guy feels about what he does, and the clip leaves the rest of that answer for the full segment.

The Dog Walk

@DogWalkBarstool

Do scalpers feel any remorse? Presented by @thefarmersdog

The timing is good, because Pokemon scalping is a real fight right now and not just a parent complaining online. The Pokemon Company is going after bulk resellers directly. In Japan, new rules took effect on October 13 on Yahoo! Auctions and Yahoo! Flea Market that ban listings of cards by the carton, empty booster boxes and packs, and large quantities of identical products right after release. The first set covered is the TCG's 30th Celebration set.

There is a catch, though. Those rules only apply to Japan. Some platforms like Mercari have similar voluntary measures, but nothing comparable has hit international marketplaces like eBay. So the playbook in Eddie's clip, buy it out and flip it later, still works pretty much everywhere else.

The replies did what replies do, and one person basically pitched the trade as an investment opportunity.

Cons

@CaptainCons

@EddieBarstool Go in with $12 and come out a king

That joke is also the whole reason the job exists. The gap between the shelf price and the resale price is where scalpers make their money, and it is why kids standing in a Walmart get nothing. Credit Eddie for asking the guy to his face instead of just dunking on him from a distance. Whether you come away sympathetic or more annoyed, you at least hear how the operation runs from somebody who does it. The real tell will be what happens if the Japan-style resale bans ever spread to eBay, because that is the day this guy's business model gets a lot harder.