The Real Reason McDonald's Is Limiting The Amount Of Happy Meals You Can Buy

We are just days into the latest Pokémon-themed Happy Meal and McDonald's has decided to encourage its franchises to limit the amount of Happy Meals served to each customer. The fast food chain is having issues due to the rare toys that are inside — Pokémon trading cards. The major problem is that customers are going to various McDonald's locations and buying all of the stocked Happy Meals, per FoodBeast. However, these culprits are not over enthused children, they're adults.

"With such significant demand for our promotional Pokémon TCG cards, and some fans even going to extreme lengths to get them, we're working quickly to address shortages and also strongly encouraging restaurants to set a reasonable limit on Happy Meals sold per customer," McDonald's said in a statement to Polygon. "We want to offer the full Happy Meal experience to as many families as possible, and help ensure everyone is able to get in on the fun!"

Most of the offenders are adults that boasted about the hauls of the Happy Meals they bought to get as many card packs as possible, per Fast Company. Others simply purchased one Happy Meal and extra toys, with one person buying 15 additional card packs. While some may simply be gathering all of the cards for themselves, others are setting themselves up for a big payday by scalping. Restaurant Business has already noticed that cases of cards are commanding prices of over $1000, while 10 packs reached $100. 

The price of these cards is due to their rarity — there are only 25 of these Pokémon 25th anniversary cards. So, by nature, they are a collectors item and by buying all of the cards on the cheap at McDonald's, scalpers can charge exorbitant rates for them. A similar issues occurred with the launch of the PS5, as TechRadar reported. While McDonald's is now making moves to lessen the issue, the promotion itself has proven itself disastrous.