With the meager amount of information I have on the matter, I've got to agree with crystal_pidgeot on this. I mean, ever ask yourself why the powers-that-be don't just sell singles directly? When a game gives you a booster pack for $X.XX but, because of the efforts of the company and community, that pack is going to contain at least $X.XX worth of trade fodder/cards worth playing... or at least when it doesn't it is seen as a rare "dud", we're doing TCG's right.
There were plenty of times
before I switched to the PTCGO where I got disgusted with sets and/or ran low on funds and thus didn't buy a lot of boosters, but beyond the craziness of the "fad phase," I think the last time I was
truly confident buying booster packs was Skyridge. I
hate saying that, because I don't want it to be mistaken as praise for WotC overall handling of the game; IIRC that was a set where you were guaranteed a Rare, with the Reverse Holo being its own "slot" in the booster contents and anything beyond a Rare replacing a Common.
I could easily be remembering it wrong. While it may also have been a result of specific players/collectors in our area, it seemed like even the worst pack at least technically had cards worth its MSRP.
So... cry me a river about people scaling. I won't go so far as to say people ought to scale, or that you have to like those people. I
will say that,
unless store policy is being violated, you ought to hate the game and not the player. Either be mad the store isn't "protecting" its boosters or - as I think you ought to be - take issue with the people willing to pay so much for pretty cardboard. The company wouldn't take this "lottery" style approach if people didn't embrace it, ya know? This reminds me way too much of the toy aficionados who get so mad at people who buy to resell
yet are willing to buy from those same people. Not the same thing, but there seems to be this similar entitlement mentality. Do you want packs with unaltered odds? Find a store that will give you what you want!
Target, however, is a discount retailer just like Wal-Mart. They have a different way of going about it, but the hard differences between them are minute.
For the record,
neither of those chains sell cards directly, even though it seems like it. Instead, and they do this for various other products, another vendor pays them to have its products on the shelves, and the store handles the actual transactions, but ultimately you're buying from the vendor, not the chain store.
@Number51x there is a chance
you would have been the one to get in trouble if that particular target didn't mind scalers! I suspect that the person in question would merely have been asked to stop. Oh, and I encourage scalers to
also buy their own booster.
Fortunately, not all the good cards in Pokémon are Holo-Rares; strip out the packs that weigh just a bit more, then sell the rest as "scaled" packs for well under the MSRP
but high enough to recoup your losses. If you find the right customers, it becomes a win-win scenario.
