Online resellers are making bank from Pokémon Happy Meals

McDonalds released a Pokémon Happy Meal this week to mark the 25th anniversary of the franchise. The boxes, which have Pikachu printed on the side, include a pack of Pokémon cards. There are more than 50 to collect and each pack contains a McDonalds-exclusive holographic (or Holo) card. Already, there's a bustling online market for the cards and resellers are raking it in.

Some speculators are heading to McDonalds early to snap up Happy Meals and reports suggest they're buying as many Happy Meals as they can. Some locations are limiting the number of Happy Meals an individual can buy, but that doesn't seem to have stopped resellers from profiting.

The card packs are often selling for at least $10. Some people have gotten their hands on boxes containing more than 100 packs, which are selling on eBay for $1,000 or more. Whether the exclusive cards will be valuable enough in the long run to justify paying over the odds remains to be seen, but they appear to have been produced in large quantities, so they might not be very rare.

Happy Meals with the card packs might not be easy to come by, though, with some fans reporting that their local McDonalds outlets have sold out. Still, at least some people who are only after the cards aren't simply throwing away the food, and are instead donating it to folks in need.

Given that the Pokémon Trading Card Game seems to have become more popular than ever over the last year or so, it shouldn't be too surprising that an online market sprung up rapidly for these packs. Some prominent Twitch creators have spent thousands of dollars on card packs to open on their stream in the hope of finding rare, valuable Holos with which they can turn a profit.