McDonald's launched a Happy Meal in Japan with exclusive Pokémon cards. However, scalpers produced tons of food waste after selling out the meals to get the merch. The brand responds with an anti-scalper policy for its next Happy Meal.
What is McDonald's Japan's anti-scalper policy?
An X post in August by Dextero showed bags of untouched Happy Meals lined up outside of a store. Scalpers took the exclusive Pokémon cards, leaving the food to go to waste.
McDonald's Japan has apologized after limited edition Pokemon Happy Meals containing exclusive cards sold out in less than 24 hours
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) August 9, 2025
People were buying the meals just to resell the cards on eBay, with some customers just throwing out their food pic.twitter.com/pdZrnWBD0Z
McDonald's apologized for the chaos and food waste and implemented a new Happy Meal policy ahead of the Sanrio-themed launch.
Now, customers can only purchase three Happy Meals per group. The order must take place in-store or through a drive-thru. Happy Meal orders cannot be placed through the mobile app or ordered for delivery for the time being, according to Newsweek.
What do customers think of the policy?
Customers on the r/Japan subreddit react to the new policy, praising the fast food chain for taking action.
"Good, hope this helps to stop some of the madness from the last round. The amount of food wastage was incomprehensible," one says.
"Should make it so that you have to prove you've eaten the food to get the toy," another suggests.
However, others suggest that the new policy will inconvenience customers and be ineffective.
"This solves nothing.. absolutely nothing. It makes it horrible for normal people who can't go to the store to get ONE. No scalpers were paying Uber fees to begin with. Happy meals were already capped, nobody cared and still bought piles of them," a commenter says.
"In person isn’t gonna work as well as they are hoping since the scalpers are just going to go to multiple restaurants anyway. Plus, there’s the fact that they can just wait for a shift change to go back to the same place again," another writes.
"This is dumb. I live next to a McDonald's and usually order Happy Meals for the kids via the app as I am stepping out of my front door to pick it up the moment I arrive," a third adds. "Now I need to not only stand in line but also explain carefully that if there is anything between the buns besides the patty and the slice of cheese, there will be a riot at home."
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