Van Gogh Pikachu Promo Releasing Again in February, Prices Dipping!

chris.n7 said:
And these stores are just gonna keep them for themselves lol. Why would they give them out?
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Exactly! When these sell for upwards of $100-150 a card, why would they just give them away to customers? That is $10,000-15,000 in essentially free money that these stores are getting shipped to them. This is compared to the $3,000 they would roughly make from customers paying $30 to get a copy of the card (not including the hassle of dealing with scalpers and the lot). Essentially losing out on $7,000-12,000 by giving these out to customers with $30 purchases. No shot these stores play by TPCI rules and do the promotion as advertised.
 
Well that's good to hear, I hope the amount is enough to mee-
Pokemon’s official distributors have contacted local gaming stores and told them they will each get 100 copies of the promo to distribute to customers.
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And there's the rub, the terms "good thinking" and "meeting demand" continue to be foreign concepts to TPCi and I doubt that'll chance unless a massive amount of people are willing to hoof it over to their HQ (everyone and dog knows online protests are load of bulldust and ultimately amount to nothing) and raise some serious heck.
EpicCoolGuy923 said:
Almost all of them. When one copy of the card is worth well over $100, why would the employees and or managers not just take them for themselves?
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It all depends on how the promos are distributed, if TPCi is distributing the promos with League materials I could see stores refusing to follow the promotion's rules losing their League accreditation and their ability to host events.
 
I'm glad it's still a limited thing, honestly; that's part of the fun of it. It's a cool keepsake. But this is going to be a disaster. What I would do is sort of in the middle: make a slightly different version and make that widely distributed.
 
ApricornNut said:
So when will TPCI be stepping up and making a company announcement saying that they'll cover the medical costs for all of the injured retailer employees in the Netherlands when all's said and done?
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Don’t worry, I’m sure nobody is going to get trampled. And there probably won’t be the same density of people as there was at the Van Gogh museum, where there were entire shelves of desirable Van Gogh merchandise rather than just a hundred cards that cost $30 in ordinary merchandise.

That’s not to say that people won’t game the line by changing clothes or anything, of course. Unfortunately it isn’t to say that none of these shops will get robbed, either. We’ll just have to see how it pans out.
 
A quick search of "game store" in the Netherlands turns up 18 results. Hardly a market breaking amount of inventory, but the hype around this card is so ridiculous, it'll probably still have an effect.

As far as game stores scalping these, from what I understand, TPCi does not take kindly to that type of behavior. Stores could lose access to other promotions, or even lose their distribution. That promo distribution is worth a lot, but game stores deal in millions of dollars in sales. It doesn't seem like it would be worth it to the store owners, but there's definitely going to be some employees trying to swipe these.
 
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Ambassador said:
Making it exclusive to LGSes is genuinely worse. They should, at this point, make this a promo in one of those over-produced boxes of booster packs and let those who want it get it and call it a day.
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How so? LGS keep the game alive and find it hard to keep going when they get lesser amount of product than larger retailers. Many in my local area have had to close in recent times because of this. They were all reliable and trustworthy places who didn’t keep hold of “valuable” sets/cards and distributed them fairly
 
Wow…really? I live in Southern California, where there are customers abound (so no real need to beg people to come in), and all 5 of the local game stores I go to within 20 minutes are reputable. A few sell at MSRP, but the others sell below MSRP. Think Gamenerdz pricing (which is also a LGS near my brother’s home in Dallas).
 
jakeobie said:
Wow…really? I live in Southern California, where there are customers abound (so no real need to beg people to come in), and all 5 of the local game stores I go to within 20 minutes are reputable. A few sell at MSRP, but the others sell below MSRP. Think Gamenerdz pricing (which is also a LGS near my brother’s home in Dallas).
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Your brother lives near Gamenerdz’ physical location! I’ve ordered from that store’s website multiple times! Very good customer service.

I’m also a little thrown by Ambassador’s comment. Read Ambassador’s comments on pkmncards and you will see a variety of sound, insightful arguments backed up by official sources. Without concrete statistics on what percentage of stores sell at, above, or below MSRP, respect or ignore Pokémon’s distribution regulations, etc., calling the entire system flawed because of the, say, two to twenty (yes, even twenty is too small a sample size) stores Ambassador may have observed over the years looks like a case of experience bias.

Price gouging LGS’s have been Ambassador’s experience, however. The one store in Ambassador’s vicinity as a child chose to deal exclusively in first edition packs so the owner could charge a premium (I think the price was $8 a pack? That would be roughly $14.40 in today’s currency.) And I’m sure Ambassador has only continued to encounter this type of behavior since then.
 
Charmaster:) said:
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Don’t worry, I’m sure nobody is going to get trampled. And there probably won’t be the same density of people as there was at the Van Gogh museum, where there were entire shelves of desirable Van Gogh merchandise rather than just a hundred cards that cost $30 in ordinary merchandise.

That’s not to say that people won’t game the line by changing clothes or anything, of course. Unfortunately it isn’t to say that none of these shops will get robbed, either. We’ll just have to see how it pans out.
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Sorry, this should probably say Dutch unless stores from Denmark are included in the promotion. Apologies to any Dutch or Danish citizens I may have confused by not proof-checking this meme.
 
The Netherlands is a small country, so 100 per LGS shouldn't make much of a dent on the overall distro numbers in the US - if prices drop due to this announcement, it might be a good time to pick some up.
Adding: What would have made demand truly insane is if they issued a special edition in Dutch language, since that would have been Van Gogh's mother tongue...
 
~100 cards per store still means there will be like 50.000 to 75.000 extra cards released. (Intertoys on its own is already 220+ stores around the country.)

It would be crazy if prices didn't drop any further in the coming weeks.
 
I think it's OK if they keep the printing slightly under demand, also to be fair for the collectors, who purchased them during the hype, but they should also consider there are some indistinguishable fakes of this card... I hope they do something against that in the future prints.
 
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