It is nearly impossible to make a long-term living buying products at retail price and reselling them for more. With the resale prices on newer product coming down upon release, I've noticed several things the average Pokémon TCG collector can do to beat the scalpers.
Tool #1: Since You Can't Beat Them, Join Them — Discord Notification Communities
How do you beat bots? With bots, of course.
There are a ton of different Discord groups helping people buy and secure product. PokeNotify and Sleeved are among the many available Discord communities armed with bots, scripts, and notifications that help you stay in the know of Pokémon TCG product restocking.
The reality is that botting and scripting has infiltrated online retailers who sell Pokémon TCG product. If you want a chance to buy product at retail, you need a service that offers access to tools that scrape the internet for restocks across a wide variety of stores.
The value these Discords provide is in direct relationship with the amount of time you spend in them. You need to be able to log in and click links as soon as the notification hits you. Setting up custom notifications and familiarizing yourself with all the various channels will maximize your investment in the group.
Even with just a small amount of time spent setting up the notifications to focus on the sets, stores, or products you want to buy, your ability to buy product at MSRP increases exponentially.
Tool #2: Stake Out Your Local Big Box Store and Learn Vendor Restock Patterns
Similar to your Amazon packages, brick-and-mortar retailers utilize a last-leg distribution service responsible for delivering product to the warehouse receiving bay of your favorite big box retailer. A good distributor/retailer relationship typically involves two parties that are in full awareness of when the distributor plans to arrive.
For this reason, the vendors responsible for last-leg delivery of TCG and sports card products often have predictable restock days and times. The hardcore resellers have insider information on when the restock is about to happen, and begin camping out at Target or Walmart early in the morning.
Go to your local Target, Walmart, or GameStop. When you find people waiting near the cards, go up to them and talk to them. You'll find that there's at least one person there who was tipped the restock schedule. Note the day and time, and come back each week around the same time to verify.
The biggest piece of advice I can give you here: be polite and courteous to the employees. Being uneventful and easily forgettable as a customer is truly a gift to these employees.
Tool #3: Hunt for Deals on Online Stores
If you don't have the time to go to brick-and-mortar stores, or you don't want to support the botting community in any way, you can always hunt for MSRP deals from online stores.
I'm not talking about newly minted Shopify stores with only brand-new product, but dedicated eCommerce businesses who have been running well before the 2020 Pokémon boom, with inventory that runs deeper than just Scarlet and Violet-era products.
Exclusively eCommerce TCG shops have been around for a while. Many offer very fair ways of entering and winning product. Find retailers, get the release day and time, and set alarms and calendar notifications so you know when to jump on. Some of these stores even host true-lottery releases — your chances are slim, but it's better than doing nothing.
Let's be real: hunting for retail Pokémon cards is not a casual outing anymore. You need to put more thought and effort into buying sealed product than ever before. Whether it's being creative about what brick-and-mortar stores to go to — Macy's and ACE Hardware sell Pokémon cards, for what it's worth — or joining the botting fray, just a little bit of effort could go a long way.