Everyone wants to eat the cake (but nobody wants to bake it)

It’s allocation time again.

Pokemon 25^th. Everyone wants it but there’s not enough to go around. If that sounds familiar, you probably work in games retail.

Pokemon has been something of a holy grail for retailers these past couple of years. But the more we sell, the more people want to ram their snouts in the Poketrough. If you are a bedroom seller, here’s your opportunity to make bank and pay for your own hobby, so there is suddenly twice as much demand for product.

If you are a supermarket, you want the hot product too. All those years when you wouldn’t return the buyer’s calls… suddenly you are calling them. Send me poke-pallets and send them now! I need to stack my poke-products next to my rutabagas, and I need to stock them in depth so people can steal them. Stat!

So what is a distributor to do?

What is ‘fair’?

So, I’m a store in central Manchester. We started running Pokemon in 2004 – we are one of the oldest continuously running leagues, and in terms of prerelease I think we are the second biggest allocation in the country.

We don’t sell Pokemon on line. And we don’t mark it up.

But since 2004 we now have three stores within one minute of us that also stock Pokemon. Go twenty minutes out and there are another three. Go an hour out and there are more than fifty.

They did not spend seventeen years building Manchester’s Pokemon community.

Support for a community is support for a brand. Pokemon hasn’t been a get rich quick scheme for us. We don’t even sell it online – too many bots were hitting us trying to buy up all our stock.

Now many stores consider this is good. One of my friends was complaining about his allocation of Pokemon ETB’s being five percent of his order, but while we’d doubled our orders last year he’d preordered five thousand expecting to flip them.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

You can see the community support axis in two ways: community growth over time and financial expenditure over time. A store that is consistently growing its play community in store is one that sees both axis grow over that time – because more players equals more product sold.

And if you don’t sell online, those are physical products sold to your physical community in your physical store.

Lets go back to the fact that there are three stores within one minute of me, none of whom run and support Pokemon.

One means of allocating would be to give everyone the same amount of stock. That way its fair. My huge organised play focussed store in the city centre with multiple staff and a seventeen year long history of both event support and financial support of both Pokemon and my distributor would get exactly the same number of packs and boxes as my local post office or that bedroom seller with a VAT number.

This is where I have some sympathy for online stores and bedroom sellers. Because we are all selling blind. People buy from us because they can guarantee getting the stiff they pre-ordered.

Only now they can’t.  

We’ve all oversold. Product is going to be allocated because the supermarkets quite fancy it. Because stores that would have previously sold a booster box now want their full allocation on everything, so they can flip it.

Normally I’d have done the work and got the reward. My prerelease kit allocations are the proof of our hard graft these past seventeen years. Normally a release is huge prerelease weekend followed by a huge chunk of box sales. We don’t pad our preorders, and we don’t flip our product – if I sold £10K of Pokemon last set, I have customers lined up that I built as customers for £10K of the next set.

Only, I’m not getting £10K. Because I’m getting a quarter of that. And so are the three stores, the six stores and the fifty stores.

Most of those guys did nothing for seventeen years. They weren’t cheering the little electric hamster dude on all those long years, set after set.

Here’s what happens on Day One.

All my stock has sold out to preorder and then some. We’re being allocated to a quarter of what we had already been given a maximum allocation of. So people come in, and we tell them we have sold out to preorder.

But that’s fine right, because there are three other stores – one of which doubled their prices on Pokemon.

Instead of selling what I consider to be the allocation I have spent seventeen years building, I’m sending those players to stores with less in the game who like free money.

And. That. Money. Is. Mine.

I laid the groundwork for it by building sound foundations for my business. I built the community. I built that on trust – the trust that a ETB that is listed at £52,50 is going to actually be £52.50. I built that on reputation – that we have the largest allocation of prerelease kits, so we are the biggest and best place to go for prerelease. We built the community brick by brick, player by player, event by event.

Other stores could have done that. But they didn’t. Half their space isn’t event space. To them this is just free money – and they price accordingly, for even freer money. But the difference is next year I – currently – will be still buying that much Pokemon or more. All a flat allocation does is demolish a floor of my building. Buit it’s a distributor, sat on the thing like Miley Cyrus who is wielding the wrecking ball.

Here the thing. You KNOW who your best brick and mortar Pokemon stores are. Because they have big prerelease allocations. Those stores have communities that they serve, that – like me – took many long years to build up to where they are.

How many in store Pokemon leagues are there?

Fifty?

Sure, we have had a pandemic and things are tough all around. Nobody knows what those numbers really look like right now. But those communities didn’t go. They are real – real players, real stores, real support long term.

And so I am asking the industry to rethink its strategy on allocation. One size doesn’t and shouldn’t fit all. Just as we support our communities, distribution should prioritise support for us.

Because our growth was real. We’re the Pokecake, not the Pokesouffle. And next year all those people will have moved on to sell the next hot thing. Maybe its collectible novelty toilet seat covers. But we will still be there, supporting you, supporting our players and supporting Pokemon as a brand and a lifestyle. Give us the tools we need to do that.