A 45-year-old man walks alone through the darkened aisles of a Best Buy that is closed after midnight, surrounded by display models and box sets, waiting for the store to open so he can be the first person in line for Pokémon cards. The scene looks almost like something out of a movie. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It wasn’t.
It was early Wednesday morning when Patrick Keys was arrested at a Best Buy store in Pasadena, California. Employees watching a live security feed saw him walking through the store hours after it had closed. When the police arrived, a worker gave them a key to get in, and Keys was arrested without any problems. The charge is that you might have broken in. There were no signs that someone had broken in. Police think he just stayed in the store after it closed for the night.
Outside that same store, a group of Pokémon fans had set up camp on the sidewalk, waiting for a new card to drop. One woman, who looked confused, told reporters that she had gone to the bathroom and then came back to find police cars all over the place. “Not even 15 minutes,” she said. This is the kind of note that stays with you. Even though the police were there following the rules, it still felt like a crime scene.
For years now, the Pokémon card market has been slowly but surely going downhill. What began as a trading card game for kids in the late 1990s has turned into more of a market for goods, with rare cards fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars and, in at least one case, a single card going for around sixteen million dollars. Take a moment to think about that number. That’s sixteen million dollars. For a piece of cardboard. The market isn’t slowing down, and neither is the stress it causes.
From what I’ve heard, Keys wasn’t trying to rob the place in the usual way. Witnesses outside the store thought he might have had a simpler reason: by hiding inside all night, he would be able to get cards before anyone else when the doors opened. It’s a move to compete, even if it wasn’t well thought out. It’s common for sellers to rush to clear shelves before collectors get there. This makes prices go up and irritates people who want to play the game or build a collection. From the outside, no one seems to know if Keys was a collector or a seller. No matter what, anyone who has seen a limited-edition item sell out online in three minutes understands the logic, even if it’s wrong.
As more and more stories like this come out, it seems like the hobby has moved to an awkward place. Pokémon was made so that you could collect them, compete, and talk to other Pokémon fans. That’s still how a lot of people interact with it. But the secondary market has added a level of stress that makes a card drop more like a business meeting than a fun Saturday morning activity. People camp out overnight. It was set to remind them to restock. It looks like some of them hide in stores.
Some people might feel sorry for Keys, not because of the choice he made, which was obviously the wrong one, but because of the circumstances that made it seem like a good idea to try. A 45-year-old man was hunched over between the home appliances and games sections as the lights went out, waiting for his chance to get a new Pokémon. That picture shows something about the market that no price chart can.
He was arrested without a problem. It’s likely that the cards went to the people who had worked outside all night. In the parking lot, people were still living. A holographic Charizard was sitting under glass in a display case somewhere, not caring about anything.
