Calbee and Amazon are Making me Mad

 

As I mentioned last week, I've been having a very hard time finding any Calbee baseball cards in stores this year.  The cards were supposed to go on sale on March 27th in convenience stores, and April 3rd in Supermarkets, but so far I've only been able to find them for sale in one small kiosk in a train station near the Nagoya Dome.  Unfortunately that store is not on my regular commute, so except for the three bags I purchased on that one day I haven't been able to score any more. 

This is not for a lack of effort on my part. Almost every day for the past couple of weeks I've been stopping on the way back home from work at every convenience store or supermarket I can find (and there are a lot of them) and every time I've come up empty.

This is very unusual.  I've been buying Calbee baseball chips for years now (first bag purchased was in 2000, though 2004 was the first year I bought them in large numbers to try to complete the set) and this has never happened before.  Usually within a few days of the release in late March bags of Series 1 Calbee baseball chips are to be found at pretty much every major supermarket chain in town (convenience stores are more hit and miss).  

I was wondering if this was just a Nagoya thing, but on looking it up online, Japanese collectors nationwide have noticed this too and are complaining about it on social media (like here and here). In fact they've done more than complain about it, they've asked their local supermarkets, and some even asked Calbee directly, about what is going on.  And the answer they received may surprise you.

The culprit?  You guessed it: Frank Stallone.

Ah that gag never gets old (laughs to self).

Seriously though, they indicate that the shortage is the result of the World Baseball Classic.  It seems that the demand for baseball cards has shot through the roof and Calbee hasn't been able to produce enough to meet it, which explains why they aren't on sale almost anywhere.

This kind of makes sense, but it also pisses me off. The increase in demand doesn't mean that Calbee is producing fewer cards than normal.  Nor does it mean that they are so popular that they are flying off store shelves: rather they aren't even reaching store shelves in the first place. 

We can infer from the fact that the only place that has a ready supply of them available is Amazon that what it really means is that Calbee has given most of its production to that outlet and left retail stores in the lurch.

This sucks for a few reasons. 

First, Amazon only sells  them in cases. Who in their right mind wants to buy bags of plain chips by the caseload?  Unless you are a flipper, probably not you. 

Second, Amazon prices are a rip off.  A case of 24 bags costs 5900 Yen, which works out to 245 yen per bag.  That is more than double what they sell for at convenience stores (the ones I bought last week cost me 116 Yen per bag).

Third, kids don't buy expensive stuff in bulk off of Amazon.  They can on the other hand buy cheap bags of chips at local supermarkets or stores.  This is one of the things I've always liked about Calbee: they make the hobby accessible to kids.  Limiting sales to Amazon on the other hand means only selling to grown ups.  Hard core grown ups at that: casual collectors who might buy a few bags here and there on their way home from work (like me) sure as hell aren't going to buy massive cases of overpriced chips they can't eat.

And just to reinforce my annoyance with Twitter, in order to find posts by actual Japanese collectors talking about this year's Calbee cards to try to find out what was going on I had to wade through a massive shitstorm of Amazon shill ads (like this one) mocking convenience stores for not having Calbee baseball chips in stock while encouraging us to go to Amazon to buy them.  In fact, going through the Twitter storm its notable that Calbee itself isn't doing most of the advertising for Calbee baseball chips anymore, Amazon is.  Fuck all of us who don't want to buy Calbee cards by the caseload at double the normal price is the message to us  collectors I guess?  

Its not clear if this situation is going to be resolved or if this is a permanent thing, - according to Calbee's own website the product is no longer on sale ("休売中") - meaning that this might be the first spring in many years that I've been unable to easily buy Calbee Series 1 baseball chips.  This is really frustrating. A few years ago I wouldn't have minded too much since I was getting into the habit of buying the complete sets off of Yahoo Auctions flippers anyway.  But last year I really enjoyed being able to collect the sets bag by bag with my kids and I spent all winter quite looking forward to being able to do so again this year.  Hopefully by the time Series 2 is released this stupidity will be resolved, though our enthusiasm will likely have waned by then (if the Dragons' performance so far is any indication of how that will develop) and this might be the sort of thing that completely kills my kids' already somewhat frail interest in collecting baseball cards.  Well done on that accomplishment, Calbee and Amazon.