Earlier this week, McDonald’s started a new promotion to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Pokemon franchise. Fans can temporarily receive TCG packs in Happy Meals, or as a separate purchase at participating locations. Unfortunately, Pokemon cards are quite popular at the moment and resellers have taken the promo cards. There have even been auctions of entire cases of the cards on eBay! Following ComicBook.com’s previous article on the situation, McDonald’s reached out to us with a statement about its plans to ensure that fans can enjoy the current promotion. You will find this statement below.
“We love to see fans’ passion for our limited-time Happy Meal promotion celebrating 25 years of Pokémon. With such high demand for our promotional Pokémon TCG cards, and some fans are even doing everything they can to get them, we are working quickly to address shortcomings and strongly encourage restaurants to set a reasonable limit on the number of Happy Meals sold per customer. We want to bring the full Happy Meal experience to as many families as possible, and ensure everyone can participate to the fun! “
According to McDonald’s, individual restaurants may decide whether or not to sell toys a la carte, but it is company policy not to sell boxes of Happy Meal toys. The company also does not approve the resale of the toy through what it calls “unauthorized channels.” Instead, it believes the cards should be offered exclusively through the promotion.
Some stores seem to have already set limits on the number of toys that can be offered to each customer, with many limiting customers to four or five. Now that the company is encouraging stores to impose these kinds of restrictions, it will be interesting to see if it will stop some resellers from catching them all before fans can.
For those unfamiliar with the promotion, McDonald’s Happy Meals is currently offering 25 Pokemon cards to celebrate the history of the franchise. The cards are offered in blind packs of four, although each card also has a hologram variant. The TCG packs are accompanied by additional items such as cartons, stickers and more.
Did you pick up McDonald’s Pokemon cards during the promotion? Have you noticed restaurants that are sold out? Let us know in the comments or share it directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk about gaming!