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The story
After some otaku on X (formerly Twitter) argued that “Mercari should be shut down” and called it “a breeding ground for scalpers,” users on 5ch’s livestream discussion board pushed back one after another. Some pointed out that without resale marketplaces, out-of-print retro games and collectible goods would lose their only distribution channel, while others argued the real target of criticism should be companies that fail to crack down on scalping. The discussion also expanded into calls for mandatory ID verification and debate over whether the true root cause is the blind-box/lottery sales model itself.
What people said
A used game store won't even give you half of what Mercari does.
Also, Mercari's where clueless amateurs list out-of-print books and retro games without knowing their value, so you can snag them cheap. If it weren't easy to sell retro games on Mercari, a ton of them would've just been thrown away.
I don't know much about gadgets, but without Mercari, the only surviving units would be the lucky few that happen to get brought into Hard Off (a used electronics chain).
Buying/selling just the box or just the manual would disappear too.
Broken parts get valued at basically nothing if you bring them to a used shop, but you can score cheap hidden gems, so the more rural you are, the more screwed you are without flea market apps.
Plus the junk-item gacha hits sometimes too.
I'm from the countryside so I get it, but there are also guys scavenging Hard Off just to resell on Mercari, so I can't say it's all good.
Actually, retro game console prices apparently got driven up by resellers.
Sure, resellers driving up prices is an issue, but if items just get thrown away and surviving numbers drop, prices would go up anyway.
Even without resellers, the specialty otaku shops would jack up prices themselves.
I think it's just a matter of whether stuff flows to Yahoo Auctions or Mercari.
Even if neither existed, eBay would've just taken over anyway.
but Mercari users are even worse.
But at least you can spot the red-flag sellers easily from their profile.
I think that's a good idea.
I've already done ID verification, so my My Number is already linked.
The games I buy don't have either option.
I recently picked up Princess Minerva and Super Real Mahjong P5 Paradise for the Super Famicom — neither one is available new or as a download.
When the telephone card I wanted went past 20,000 yen, I finally gave up.
The other bidder was clearly obsessed, and with hundreds of reviews they looked like a dealer, so I figured it was hopeless and bowed out.
Wait, what's a 'teleca'?
Telephone card.
A prepaid ticket for public payphones.
It's a telephone card.
Nobody uses them anymore, so at this point they're purely collector's items.
But even if you kill Mercari, as long as Japan doesn't pass a law regulating resale — or individual buying and selling in general — another flea market site will just pop up.
It's exactly like saying 'even if you kill X, a new SNS site will just take its place.'
That sounds like it'd run into freedom of economic activity issues, so it'd be tough, right?
There's also the resale price maintenance system and antitrust law to consider.
Exactly, that's why completely preventing resale is hard.
The best countermeasure would be 'nobody buys that stuff,' but in the end people (fellow otaku, no less) end up buying it anyway — so aren't they the real enemy?
For things like food, medicine, or hygiene products —
items tied to public health and safety — regulation makes sense.
But character merch isn't in that category at all,
so the idea of the government stepping in to regulate that is just too absurd.
I think suppliers should just supply enough to meet demand.
But look at trading cards or brand goods — they deliberately restrict supply to pump up market value.
Blind-box merch is the same way.
And yet it's always the original buyers or the resellers getting blamed — it's a bizarre phenomenon.
If blind-box merch goes too far, that itself gets criticized.
But it doubles as entertainment, so getting rid of it entirely seems hard, don't you think?
If you go down that road, you couldn't even have gachapon machines anymore.
Pokémon cards have had production increase for 5 straight years — production doubled over 6 years — and they're still selling at scalper prices.
Same here — I think those buyers are the root of all evil.
Okay, extreme hypothetical, obviously impossible, but say salt ran out worldwide and there was only one jar left — someone out there would pay tens of thousands, even hundreds of millions for it, right? Because they can't live without it.
For that person, that item is their 'salt.'
Because of this and Suruga-ya (a major used-goods retailer), the market price for a game I love jumped about 20,000 yen in just a few years.
the blind-box/lottery sales model that stokes gambling urges is the worst offender here.
They dangle bait like it's gambling addiction and squeeze money out of people.
Any rights holder who allows that kind of business is either too dumb to think for themselves or a greed-soaked miser.
I get that.
I have franchises I love too, but out of principle I refuse to buy blind-box merch, for the sake of the industry's health and growth.
But other people keep buying it, so production just keeps going.
In the long run, stuff like that is nothing but a net negative.
The thing is, otaku never criticize the franchise itself when it's the one scheming to profit.
Well, because if people stop buying over that, the franchise declines, and that defeats the whole purpose…
Right, and take the Kura Sushi case — the operating company that approved the collab bears responsibility too.
It was undeniably the operator's side that agreed to a system where figures were mixed into the 'Bikkura Pon' capsule prize game and your odds went up based on how many plates you ate — yet only Kura Sushi kept getting slammed unreasonably hard.
Sure, the middleman cut is a problem too, but that's not the whole story.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Peer-to-peer marketplaces like Mercari operate on a system that doesn’t require sellers to hold a used-goods dealer license, leaving anti-resale measures and handling of stolen goods up to each company’s own voluntary rules. The criticism stems partly from frustration with this slow response, but the same system has also supported the circulation of products manufacturers no longer produce, like retro games and out-of-print merchandise — and the pushback in the thread points to exactly this double-sided nature. There’s also the view that soaring resale prices for limited-edition goods and cards are partly caused by the blind-box sales and made-to-order structures that deliberately restrict supply to keep market value high, meaning regulating flea-market apps alone wouldn’t solve the root problem — a point likely to keep resurfacing. Strengthening identity verification, such as linking accounts to My Number, is an area where discussion is already progressing in practice, and the thread’s proposal is an extension of that trend.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Otaku on X: ‘Shut down Mercari! Scalpers!’ — Aren’t these guys just newbies?“.
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