I lost before I started the first time I attempted to purchase a Pokémon Elite Trainer Box using the standard method, which involves holding a phone, refreshing the Target app, and standing in a parking lot at 7:58 a.m. The listing was already marked as “out of stock” when the page loaded. I wasn’t the first to do it. It was written in code.
That is the current quiet reality of purchasing Pokémon cards in North America. Automated bots are performing tasks that a human cannot complete in seconds behind the scenes of almost every restock on Target.com, Walmart, GameStop, and the official Pokémon Center website in milliseconds. They complete checkout forms instantly, identify new inventory as soon as it appears, and finish transactions before the majority of customers have even refreshed the page. It’s not glitzy. By today’s standards, it’s not even very sophisticated. Like a vending machine that never stops feeding coins to the same customer, it is simply quick, unrelenting, and operating continuously in the background.
The scale is what distinguishes this from traditional scalping, which involves people setting up camp outside stores and manually purchasing shelves. Dozens of accounts, dozens of shipping addresses, and dozens of payment methods can all be used by a single bot operator to hit the same restock at the same time. Purchase limits have been tested by retailers. Seldom do they hold. There’s always a workaround, such as creating a new account or using a slightly different email address. Despite their insistence that they are taking action, retailers appear to be gradually losing this game.
All of this is clearly driven by an economic engine. In terms of how people discuss them, Pokémon cards have evolved into something more akin to an alternative asset class than a toy aisle item, falling somewhere between sneakers and collectible art. Within hours of release, resale prices on websites like eBay frequently surpass retail prices by 100% or more. That markup is the whole business model for a bot operator. Purchase for $50, sell for $120, and repeat this process for hundreds of units every week. It’s difficult to describe it as complex math.
The openness with which all of this now occurs is peculiar. Similar to traffic reports, Discord servers are specifically designed to track restock timing store by store. In the same way that someone might boast about a fantasy football lineup, people share screenshots of bot dashboards. Even among those who would never identify as scalpers, there is a certain pride in the practice, which speaks to how commonplace it has become.
The parent company of Pokémon has reacted piecemeal: it has increased print runs, occasionally bundled popular boxes with unwanted products as an apparent annoyance to resellers, and in certain international markets, it has even tested ID verification. None of it has addressed the fundamental issue. The business might not want to. Whether or not people openly acknowledge it, high demand, sold-out shelves, and exorbitant resale prices are all examples of free marketing.
The experience is generally just exhausting for the typical collector. After months of waiting for a restock, it disappeared in less than a minute, and an hour later, the same box was listed for twice the price. The individuals operating these bots seem to be early adopters of a system that retailers built badly and never fixed, rather than outright villains.
Pokémon will likely have less of an impact on whether this slows down or continues to worsen than whether retailers ever determine that the expense of repairing checkout infrastructure is worthwhile. It hasn’t been thus far.
