I’m usually not surprised by the lengths scalpers will go to in an effort to get Pokémon cards, but when it escalates to violence I remember just how far gone some of these people are. Over the weekend, a video of adults nearly choking each other out in front of a Pokémon vending machine started circulating, and considering there aren’t even any kids around trying to buy cards, it’s pretty safe to assume these men were trying to buy cards to resell them.
The video originates from an Instagram post on PokéStreetz, an account that posts videos of scalpers buying up stock at stores and fights at various retailers. (The video was submitted by user @imwjb, though their profile is private.) Shot from the perspective of someone wearing what seem to be Meta glasses, the video shows the wearer leaving an ACME supermarket and seeing three people on their phones waiting in front of a Pokémon card vending machine. The person recording walks in front of the other three and starts to buy a box of Phantasmal Flames cards, only for one of the other guys to shove him into shopping carts before the person recording wraps his hand around the other guy’s throat.
They both let go of each other and the guy who threw the first shove said they’d been waiting there for an hour. For context, in an effort to deter scalpers, these machines only dispense a certain amount of stock in timed intervals. So, if you were waiting for a “restock,” you might end up hanging around for quite a bit before you could actually buy any cards. After throwing some names back and forth, the guy who tried to buy the cards walks away, so I guess the guys who were waiting for an hour got their cards in the end; they just had to engage in a Pokémon battle without any Pokémon.
The PokéStreetz account asks viewers to weigh in on who’s in the right in this situation, and I guess if you wanted to get technical about it, the guy recording didn’t throw the first punch and in a normal polite society, would have been able to buy Pokémon cards without getting thrown into shopping carts. He did press the buttons on the screen before the other guys fair and square, but his initial reaction when the scalpers confronted him doesn’t make it sound like this was a misunderstanding, but rather that he was trying to buy the cards to antagonize the people who had been waiting. In any case, I’m surprised that someone would publish a video of themselves choking someone for Pokémon cards onto the internet, even if they didn’t initiate the physical altercation.
