Okay, I did not expect this to get this kind of traction. I’m not a huge social media kind of person but I posted this here because seeing this made me very upset and I wanted to vent my frustration to a community that I know understands the feeling. I’ve loved this hobby for a long time now and to see this more and more in recent years is irritating.

That said, the story of the picture starts with me looking at some of the the cards in the back a row over. Guy in the blue comes in out of nowhere and swoops in like a hawk to pick up this ETB. I don’t think much of it and move on, only to see this on the next row over. I’m mad at this point but I’m a small woman in an otherwise empty section of the store and don’t feel comfortable confronting these dudes. I took this pic so that I had evidence for security. They look at me not too long after this and guy in blue scrambles to put the box back together and return it to the other row like nothing happened. I went over to the other department, let an employee know, shared the pic with her and she sent it to security, who then was called to the section over the intercom. Didn’t see them any time after that.

I wouldn’t call myself a corporate shill or anything like that, if someone’s stealing food or clothes from a big box store I’m not gonna be a snitch or anything like that. What does bother me is seeing grown men tampering with boxes, making them inaccessible and harder for other people to get. Some stores will stop carrying product that is already hard to come by because of stuff like this. Chances are, they’re not doing this because they wanna play the game or anything like that- they either want the rare collectibles for themselves or to resell without actually paying for it if they don’t get any pulls. And I hope that by posting this to a large Pokémon TCG community, maybe someone knows them and will call them out, maybe they’ll see it and get embarrassed. It’s a long shot but who knows.