The rash of burglaries of card and game stores continues across the country, and SFGate has a good overview of the situation in the Bay Area, with interviews with numerous shop owners about what is happening and how they deal with it.
One possible solution that won’t go over well in most places: Japan Today reports that The Pokémon Company will require facial recognition scans for customers entering its stores in that country, although the move seems to be more to prevent scalping than outright theft.
In Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, burglars were in and out of Goldenrod City Collectibles in just over six minutes, according to the store’s Facebook, and police arrived ten seconds after they left. The thieves made off with at least $340,000 worth of merchandise, including a number of PSA graded Pokémon cards, which are listed on the site. As is often the case, the store’s security cameras captured a video of the crime, which shows four masked, black-clad burglars running through the store, filling sacks with merchandise, and ferrying the stolen goods to a waiting minivan.
The burglar who broke into The Battlegrounds in Dalton, Tennessee, knew exactly what they were looking for: One Piece. Local 3 News reports that the store alarms went off about 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, August 2, and surveillance video shows a single person smashing through the door and heading straight for the display cases holding One Piece graded cards and booster boxes, making off with about $14,000 worth. The store posted a list of stolen items on its Facebook.
It was a similar story at Punch-Out Games in Forest Lake, Minnesota, where two thieves literally punched out a window and dashed into the store on the night of July 25, making off with between $30,000 and $50,000 worth of items, mostly Pokémon cards. “They were out of here in probably a minute and a half,” co-owner Mike Johnson told CBS Minnesota. Many of the stolen cards were graded and can be tracked down via serial numbers, he added. The store suffered a $250,000 burglary in 2022 but has enlarged and beefed up security since then.
At least he didn’t break a window: On July 25, a customer came into Guild Vault Games in Clarkesville, Tennessee, and bought a slabbed Charizard X EX Pokémon card worth $2,500, paying with a fraudulent credit card. By the time the transaction was cancelled, the purchaser was long gone, but Clarkesville Online has photos.
This one is a bit of an outlier: Police in Berlin, Vermont, arrested 40-year-old James Schultz on suspicion that he was the thief behind over $100,000 worth of thefts from Wonder Cards and Comics in Burlington, News10 reports. This time, though, the burglar skipped the rare cards and comics and went straight for the silver and gold, literally, taking silver bars and coins in a series of thefts during July and August. The store posted on Facebook that Schultz was a regular customer, talkative and friendly to everyone, who got to know the store well and allegedly left a second-story window unlocked to facilitate the most recent theft.
Here’s a happier story, although it doesn’t start out that way: The owners of Challenges Games and Comics in Tucker, Georgia, were told they had to leave their location in the Northlake Mall on short notice, after the mall was sold to a new owner. After negotiating an extra 30 days, owner Antonio Cade told Decaturish, he found a new space nearby but couldn’t move in until July 27. Nonetheless, the store held a soft opening just before that in order to allow customers to attend the prerelease of a new Magic: The Gathering set. Customers helped out with the move by holding fund-raisers, buying extra stuff, and helping with packing and moving. Henry Walsh, whose Dungeons & Dragons group raised money to help out, said the store is an important part of his community. “A place like Challenges is rare,” he said. “It welcomes people of all races, creeds and orientations. Places like that foster a sense of community. Many patrons are nerds like me who don’t really have anywhere to go… where we can talk about and share our interests. [That] is important in a day and age when it becomes hard for people to forge new friendships. I don’t know where I’d be without Challenges.”
Seth Nichols posts a review of Keystone Cards and Games, in Sayre, Pennsylvania, as part of his Waypoint series for the PBS station WSKG. He was particularly impressed with the store’s points system: “On one of its walls is a big calendar, displaying upcoming events to plan for, ranging from card game tournaments to D&D sessions for both kids and adults. On that same calendar was Keystone’s points system. Yes, points system; they’ve gamified visiting the store, where whenever you take part in events, bring a friend to an event, or place well in said events, you earn points. At the end of the month, everything is totaled up, and the three people with the most points earn cool promotional prizes.”
And people are still opening new game shops, including Louie’s TableTop Games in Thetford, United Kingdom, on the site of a former vape shop, according to Yahoo! News, and Rowhaven Games in Washington, DC, as noted by PoPville.Source: ICv2
