When you don’t stop to think about what it means, a certain kind of stubbornness doesn’t seem heroic. Already, running a small store in Manchester is hard work: you have to work long hours, make small profits, and deal with the usual problems like stock and staffing. There were three armed thefts of the same store, with the same owner and the same shelves of rare Pokémon cards. This makes it harder to explain. It’s not quite defiance. Not really denial. There was something quieter and trickier than both of them.
The Manchester store owner at the center of this story has become a symbol of a really strange time in UK retail crime, almost by accident. Pokémon cards, which are collectible trading cards that started in Japan in the mid-1990s and were popular with kids for a long time, have quietly become very valuable. Not every card or every person. But what about the most limited editions, the most rare prints, and the most perfect first editions? At auction, those go for prices that would make a jeweler blink. Early this year, a single Pikachu card went for more than $16 million at auction. When that number gets around, it changes how thieves see a store full of cardboard sleeves and booster packs.
What’s happened in the UK over the past few months shows exactly this change in how people see things. There have been attacks on stores in Warrington, Dorset, Bristol, Rugby, and Bournemouth. A transit van full of thieves pulled up to Celestial Collectables in Warrington. They used long-handled brushes to move security cameras out of the way and quickly ransacked the store. The owner, Chris Grundy, found out when a customer called late at night to say that the front window was put in. “Most of what they stole were…” he started to say, but stopped. There’s no need to finish the sentence.
In this situation, three thefts at the same place in Manchester start to seem less like bad luck and more like a pattern that someone chose to use. The person or people who have been after this shop knows what they want. The fact that thieves know these cards are valuable, even if they can’t always tell the difference between a $40 booster and a $40,000 holo, is also fairly new. Roy Raftery, an expert on trading cards who has helped make Pokémon sales worth more than two million pounds, said, “They know Pokémon is profitable.” They think it will be easier to rob than a bank or jewelry store.
It’s hard not to think about what it’s like to put together a record case three times. To put things back on the shelves, laminate the price tags, open the front door, and stand behind the counter again, even though you know it’s happened before and could happen again. In some versions of this story, the owner just leaves, which is a choice that most people would agree with. Insurance doesn’t cover everything. The mental damage caused by being a victim over and over again is real and can’t be stored in a spreadsheet.
It looks like the shop is still open, though. I think that fact alone says something about how important this hobby is to the people who have made a living from it. There are more than just stores selling things here. It’s a place for collectors, traders, and people who loved something as a child and never quite let it go to get together. People stole more than $100,000 worth of goods from Poké Court in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District during a community event. The owner of the store said it wasn’t even about the money. She wanted to give people a safe place to do something they liked. That feeling spreads.
There’s still no clear answer here. Police from different parts of the UK are working together, and at least two brothers, Keith and Shane Johnson, have been arrested in connection with several break-ins. But the things that are really going on haven’t changed. Cards for Pokémon are worth more than ever. Most of the time, the stores that sell them are small, independent businesses that don’t have the security measures of a bank or a high-end jewelry store. The math is still being done somewhere out there.
The owner of Manchester keeps coming back. Stolen from three times, and still counting. It’s the kind of persistence that shouldn’t make the news like a theft does, but definitely does.
