K-BOOKS, a Japanese second-hand retailer chain which mainly handles anime and game merchandise, has recently announced that it will discontinue sales of and refuse to purchase products related to multiple popular franchises.
The announcement was made via the official X account of the K-BOOKS Osaka Namba branch, listing thirteen anime and game titles whose merchandise will no longer be available at the shop. It is important to note that, while there are numerous K-BOOKS branches all across Japan, it seems that as of now, only the physical store located in Namba, Osaka will be implementing the ban.
The list of products that won’t be handled in the shop includes merchandise of major gacha game titles like Goddess of Victory: NIKKE, Blue Archive, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero and Wuthering Waves, as well as anime like The Quintessential Quintuplets and My Dress-Up Darling. Interestingly, merchandise of popular “girls in a band” anime series like K-On!, Bocchi the Rock! and Girls Band Cry will also be discontinued.
Full list of franchises subject to discontinuation:
Girls Band Cry
You and Idol Pretty Cure
K-On!
Is the Order a Rabbit?
The Quintessential Quintuplets
Zenless Zone Zero
My Dress-Up Darling
Wuthering Waves
Goddess of Victory: NIKKE
Blue Archive
Honkai: Star Rail
Honkai Impact 3rd
Bocchi the Rock!
While the reason behind this decision has not been disclosed, many X users and K-BOOKS customers speculate that it might have to do with the market’s oversaturation with, randomized (i.e. gacha) collectible merch. Tin badges, acrylic stands, key chains, trading cards, stickers and other similar small items with official artwork slapped onto them are among the cheapest kinds of merchandise to manufacture.
And often times, they are sold inside blind bags, meaning that you have to buy multiple packages until you draw the design you actually want. Recently, manufacturers have increasingly been relying on this kind of system to incentivize people to spend. However, as users on X explain, this leads to people buying numerous boxes of blind bags, keeping only the merch they want, and selling off the rest.
In Japan, used anime, game and manga merch is sold off to second-hand vendors such as K-BOOKS, Animate, Book Off, LASHINBANG or Mandarake, who then resell it at a (usually) cheaper price (save for some rare and hard-to-obtain items). But with many rounds of similar blind-bag merchandise coming out every couple of months, what usually happens is that the unpopular designs end up being sold to the second-hand retailers in large volumes. So, the stores spend their money purchasing too many items nobody actually wants to buy, and end up with piles of leftovers. On the other hand, stocking up on merchandise that people actually want would usually require buying them off from scalpers, which puts second-hand retailers in quite a tough position.
To put it simply, it sounds like K-BOOKS might have a problem with excess merch, which is why they decided to completely get rid of the main franchises causing the issue. And since it looks like the blind bag merch boom won’t be calming down anytime soon, it is yet to be seen if and how it will impact second-hand retailers on a larger scale over the next few years.
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