Heya, first post here.
I am a blader in Taiwan. I wouldn't consider myself a professional blader, but I still like to get new releases every few months and attend regional tournaments.
Recently in TW, Beyblade X has been getting a major boom after one meme post on Facebook/Threads. Everyone suddenly wanted to get a Bey of their own, and it happened out of nowhere, too.
Toy stores and convenience stores almost have no stock because people would line up at 8 in the morning just to snatch every Bey on shelves, and TT seems to have no intention of raising inventory for our distributors.
The worst part is that this attracted a ton of scalpers. They are the majority who would camp and line up during restock hours. Once they got their stuff, they would sell it on Facebook Marketplace or Shoppe for 2~3 times the retail price, 4 times if it's considered meta.
Some toy shop owners and convenience store owners started to lie about not having any left, just so they can jack up the prices, too. I used to be able to just waltz into any store and pick any bey I want, but now I can't even get unpopular beys like Rock Leone...
Recently, these scalpers started to fly to Japan just to restock Beyblades to sell. If you're visiting Japan these past few weeks, I'm sure you can feel the impact. Toy stores started limiting the number of items one can get per person. And this has annoyed a lot of fans both in Japan and Taiwan.
From what I heard from my Japanese friend, local Japanese scalpers and Chinese, Vietnamese scalpers etc have been doing the same to catch the Taiwanese bey craze.
I am sick of not being able to get Bullet Griffon and the Unicorn Delta Booster without paying 3 times the price. Most of these losers don't even understand a thing about Beyblades.
One idiot even bought all the Wizard Arcs in one store because he mistaken it for Wizard Rod.