Most companies want to run lean by finding the least amount of customers that are willing to pay the highest price for their product. This allows the company to manufacture less, yet, still profit the same as if they had to do more work.
There’s a lot of chatter online about people sitting out new sets because they don’t want to gamble X amount $$$ over MSRP to rip packs and get no hits.
Could this be the current goal? Smaller print runs, increasing short term demand to raise prices to equal the same amount of profit, and then it would solidify more hype for the long term with the secondary market .
Why could the pokemon company care about the secondary market?
From what I´ve heard (take with a grain of salt) Distributors are still getting it for regular price. Pokemon hasn’t raised prices for them at all, and some of the distributors are even charging MSRP to sell them. Not saying that the pokemon company is completely innocent, but this would most likelly apply to distributors and even then it dosen’t make sense.
I’d disagree. They seem to approach it more like a cat to me, acting like they don’t want any attention but secretly making sure you’re not ignoring them.
Low prices across the secondary market does nothing good for them.
I think the only reason that they would care is if the secondary market crashes after driving away collectors, and once collectors are gone short term investors/scalper will realize that nobody wants their products they will sell low, crashing the bubble and making demand for product drop, so does it affect Pokemon? Yes, do they care, probably not they can probably flood the market with product or they can just wait for the crash, if they print to much then scalpers and others trying to take advantage will stray away leaving product on shelves as nobody wants it, or they leave the market how it is till the bubble crashes and they get most products off shelves, then they deal with that when it gets to their by printing more charizard and pikachu or some reprint set to bring people back.
That’s just how I see it though, I could be off by a mile
On the subject of them going lean I believe that they are just trying to follow the secondary market to get the highest amount of sales, so I think they are going to be printing a lot right now while the product is being bought
They could probably improve a lot of issues they are having by moving to 5-6 cards per pack for english
I dont know if people will feel ripped off this way but its not hard to acquire commons if your collecting a set
Pokémon wants to be able to sustain their brand and deliver products into as many hands as possible.
• community building
• expansion of the franchise
• innovation and adaption
These are just some of the key goals that come to mind when I think of them as a brand and what they put out into the world and what they hope they achieve. The “cutting the fat” theory and having less folks involved to pay more isn’t in their wheelhouse. I can guarantee that.
lean theory seems more like conspiracy theory to me. Pokemon is about pumping out as much pokemon related slop as possible, for better or worse. Even with the tcg, I think they are at max capacity 24/7. Its a balancing act that they can never truly get perfect. Heck, remember during year 1 of scarlet and violet when everyone was bored and wanting them to “move on” to popular pokemon as chase cards? Its funny how quick things can flip flop, even within the same year
Pokemon isn’t really making more money per unit sold than they have in the past. So I don’t think I buy the theory. It’s the people in the middle that end up making more money.
It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on behind the scenes, but I feel that no matter what Pokemon would try to do, that the market will optimize things in the end. They could try and manage the print numbers or do other things, but the optimization happens so fast now with so many sets, in some cases overnight. All that time & energy spent could be for nothing, if the market just decides all these things in the long run.
In the WOTC era, we know that WOTC optimized early Pokemon releases quite a bit, mainly because of the MTG Fallen Empires blunder. I would think that Pokemon now must do some things similar at times, at least with certain sets or other releases.
