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The story
Kids flocked to variety stores for “Puku Puku” stickers, and for a while resale sites saw prices soar to many times the retail price. According to a Daily Shincho article, the boom has since cooled off, with some stores now offloading stock at “80% off” fire-sale prices. On 5ch’s Newsflash+ board, a discussion broke out between those who felt things had settled back into a calmer, genuinely kid-driven boom now that the resellers had moved on, and more cynical voices who suspected resellers had been artificially manufacturing the demand all along.
Now going for “80% off”: the current state of the sticker boom that had kids flooding variety stores and prices spiking on resale sites — with sighs that “only the resellers made money”
Sat, Sep 5, 11:00
Daily Shincho
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Original article here
What people said
Feels like a lot of this is resellers hyping it up to look like a real boom.
Kids collecting stickers seems like the kind of thing they'd be into forever though.
Right, that's the point — it settled back into being a boom just for kids, like it should be.
The resellers have moved on.
And peace has returned.
Same thought here.
The adhesive's gotta be weaker by then.
I figured people would cut out and swap whole backing sheets, but no — they're trading ones that have already been stuck down.
I mean, it's a sticker — of course it gets stuck down.
The moment a reseller buys one, both the manufacturer and the store have already made their money, though…
Ramping up production and investing in new equipment costs an insane amount, you know.
You can reel in suckers over and over and monetize them endlessly.
That's how the economy keeps turning, I guess.
Chiikawa was already popular way before these Puku Puku stickers took off.
That's just how kids are.
That's how they learn the need to go along with everyone else.
Meanwhile, the kid who's always contrarian, going "lol you're all obsessed with that? not interested lol," just ends up frozen out.
So basically, the iPhone theory, huh.
Apparently squishies, which were big a few years back, are making a comeback too lol
Had to Google it just to figure out what kind of thing it even was lol
At a glance it looks like a toy for girls.
Isn't this some manufactured "boom," like K-pop?
Well, it's mostly guys with zero contact with kids in here.
Exactly like a swarm of locusts.
Going after kids' toys — that's the lowest of the low.
Maybe flea-market apps need a fair price cap set per item, kept separate from strict-procedure auctions like fine art.
Mercari, Yahoo Auctions, and the like are going to need regulation.
In that community, knockoff talk is just par for the course.
I've seen plenty of "check out how bad this one is lol" posts making fun of them.
Customs confiscates them.
Though I'm sure some slip through and end up for sale anyway.
Go ahead, explain what a "real" boom actually means then.
Go ahead, spell out exactly what the problem is then.
You don't get how booms work with girls at all.
It starts with high schoolers and older teens first.
Then the little kids copy them and it spreads to the younger crowd.
It's the other way around, the other way.
Resellers strike again, huh.
Wasn't that one about suspected staff skimming stock to sell on the side?
That's worse than ordinary reselling.
Honestly, every Chiikawa restaurant collab ends in some scandal — maybe they should just stop doing them.
The pro-reseller crowd keeps saying it's good because it keeps the economy moving, but stuff keeps getting cancelled — it's not making anything better at all.
They need to regulate the system that makes reselling possible in the first place.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Reselling via flea-market apps has spread beyond game consoles and trading cards to even cheap children’s toys. In this case, opinions on the thread were split over whether the crowded stores and skyrocketing prices reflected genuine demand or were manufactured by resellers gaming supply and demand. Some pointed out that manufacturers can’t easily ramp up production because of the heavy burden of equipment investment costs, which complicates the simple claim that “manufacturers profit either way, even when resellers buy up stock.” There have also been repeated incidents involving popular character merchandise — such as the suspected under-the-counter sales during Kura Sushi’s Chiikawa collaboration — and this sticker boom can be seen as another example of the same pattern.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Newsflash+) thread “Now going for “80% off”: the current state of the sticker boom that had kids flooding variety stores and prices spiking on resale sites — with only the resellers profiting.”
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