A woman with a hot food stand tried to join the Pokémon card queue outside a Colchester toy shop and said she had been there all night.
The people who actually had disagreed.
Queues started forming in the middle of the night, hours before Smyths at the Tollgate Centre opened.
Toy shops across the UK recorded their busiest opening in decades, as reported by Creatorzine, with the new set pulling thousands of collectors out of bed.
By 8:50am on Wednesday the orderly bit was over.
Fans near the front spotted a woman moving into the line and confronted her on camera.
She protested her innocence.
“We’ve been here all night, darling, all night,” one man told her.
“None of these people saw you.”
A younger fan cut in: “I’ve been here for more than 12 hours.”
The builders with the camera
Liam and Sherv, 24 and 25, had been queueing for hours themselves and filmed the whole thing for their page.
They said the store manager came out and started removing people suspected of jumping the line.
“People were furious about getting kicked out of the queue,” they said.
“Especially one lady saying she was there overnight and she decided to come to the car park with her food stand to serve hot food.
“Apparently she had reserved a space, but then that was shortly shut down by someone else in front of the queue, saying we didn’t see her all night.”
Then came the part that turned the queue properly hostile.
According to the pair, people in the line claimed the same woman had queued at the front of an earlier drop months ago and brought around six children to join her at the last minute, so she could walk out with more stock.
Nobody has stood that claim up.
“But the reason people were getting kicked out of the queue was that the toy store manager was standing on business,” Liam and Sherv said.
“He wanted to treat people fairly.”
100,000 views and a comment section with notes
The clip sailed past 100,000 views, mostly from people who found the whole scene difficult to process.
“It’s so sad to see what Pokemon has turned into,” one wrote.
Another managed two words: “Grow up.”
“And this is over Pokemon cards,” a third said.
The sharpest one skipped the queue entirely and went for the economics: “12 hours in a queue to make £50 on eBay. They ever thought of just putting a shift in?”
Why It Matters
Two builders stood in that car park all night for cards and left with something worth more.
The footage did 100,000 views. The cards, on a good day, might clear £50 on resale.
That equation is the whole story. Scarcity drops manufacture free, high-conflict, hyper-local video, and the people best placed to film it are already standing in the queue at 3am with nothing else to do.
Retail chaos has quietly become one of the most reliable content formats going, and it costs the creator nothing except a night outdoors.
Demand for Pokémon cards keeps outrunning supply, which drags in resellers who have no interest in the cards themselves, which is how a toy shop manager ends up doing crowd control before nine in the morning.
Smyths has been approached for comment.
The next drop will show whether stores move to numbered tickets and ballots, or whether we all get another film crew in a car park at dawn.
