What a strange thing it is to walk into a Walmart during “Ani-May,” the company’s month-long celebration of all things anime, and find the trading card aisle empty. Not only partly picked over. Not dressed. The kind of empty that makes you think you might have seen the advertising signs outside.
Walmart planned its Anime Month event for May 2026 with real drive. There are more than 1,000 items in different departments that are inspired by anime. These include video games, collectible figures, Blu-rays, graphic novels, clothing, and even trading card games. A Bleach figure is selling for almost $65. There are two sizes of Pokemon Squishy. Booster boxes for Yu-Gi-Oh. It’s really impressive how broad it is, which shows that someone at Walmart took this seriously. But what about the cards? They have a different story.
The Pokemon Trading Card Game section disappears almost as soon as it’s restocked. It’s not a new problem; anyone who tried to buy a booster pack at a big box store during the height of the pandemic-era card craze will remember how frustrating it was. Target and Walmart took most trading card products off the shelves for a while back because of fights that broke out in the stores over lack of stock. People made a lot of references to Beanie Babies, which wasn’t unfair. Adults were keeping an eye on delivery trucks. A Trevor Lawrence rookie card was the cause of a fight.
After that, things have calmed down a bit, but the main problem—demand that keeps rising faster than supply and a culture of collectors who move quickly—hasn’t gone away. That hornet’s nest seems to have been poked by Walmart’s Anime Month. You can get people who buy and sell trading cards and serious collectors to move quickly by putting trading cards in the spotlight during a big promotional event.
It’s still not clear if Walmart planned the event with this kind of sellout pressure in mind. In many other ways, the promotion is well put together. There are a lot of movies and TV shows. You can get Akira on 4K for less than $12, the Demon Slayer Mugen Train movie, a Bleach Blu-ray set that is only available at Walmart, and stacks of Pokemon DVD collections from almost every generation of the show. It’s clear that someone did research on what anime fans actually buy. There aren’t many video games to choose from, but Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is one of them, and it’s priced much lower than most people would expect.
But trading cards don’t work the same way as a DVD or a graphic novel. Having a copy of Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 on a shelf doesn’t make you feel as rushed. It’s a Yu-Gi-Oh booster box or a bunch of shiny Pokemon foils. When there is a real or imagined lack of something, interest turns into a sprint.
People think that Walmart is stuck in a tension that it hasn’t fully solved. On the one hand, trading card products bring people into stores and make people really excited. On the other hand, all that excitement can lead to problems with inventory, unhappy customers, and even the odd bad scene near the card display. The event for Anime Month is a good idea in general. Giving a fandom that includes people of all ages and backgrounds shelf space in more than one department shows a cultural awareness that big box stores don’t always show.
The real question is whether the shelves can keep up with the demand. For now, you might want to call ahead if you want to go to Walmart during Ani-May to get a Pokemon booster pack. Or getting there very, very early.
