Yes. What was once a means of survival for the lower classes and less fortunate has now become a hobby for the more well off and a “job” for resellers and scalpers.
Same thing happened with vintage trading card games. Can’t go back and revisit older decks and strategies because they cost several hundreds, if not thousands now.
I very much wanted to get into Magic the Gathering, but I can not justify or even find the money to spend several hundred dollars every 8-10 months for a deck since all the cards are “cycled”, forcing you to keep buying if you want to participate. It is depressing how someone can value a single cardboard card with a shiny finish at 200 dollars, and have that be the meta. Quite literally pay to win.
It’s absolutely disgusting how expensive it is. Even moreso how many hoarders/scalpers justify it to themselves and the community that they are “providing a service”. I’m sure their bot worked really hard to spam the purchase link on release.
Many of them don’t even have significant ties or knowledge of the games they are exploiting themselves. As someone who played yugioh and Pokemon I cant find a single channel where the person opening cards has anything insightful to say about the history of the card they’re holding, or its artwork, etc… it’s just all “oh this is worth nothing, hey I remember this” drooling.
Thrifting is dying where I’m from because of this new trend of “Vintage Clothing Stores” whose employees must go around buying all the high-quality clothes from thrift stores and jacking up the prices to an insane degree. A simple White Graphic T can go from $5 to $50 and forget about nice jackets and pants that stuff can be $150 plus. When it comes to affordable clothes your only easy option is places like Kmart or Target which sells fast fashion dogshit that won’t last a week.
