We currently have Pokemon vending machines/kiosks in the PNW (Seattle, WA), but why is there still not a full Pokemon Center like the New York store? (Nov 2001-Jan 2005) Some of the most recent non-Asian stores (there is only one other non-Japanese store) were opened in connection with the new games (P.C. Paris w/ X and Y, and P.C. London w/ Sword and Shield) and lasted less than 30 days. Does anyone know if or when a Pokemon Center will come back to the United States?
Technically the New York store is still there, it was just rebranded as Nintendo World in 2005 and then Nintendo New York in 2016. Rather than specialising in one game, it expanded to cover the entire Nintendo range.
You’d have to get Nintendo to want to open a store dedicated to Pokémon and no other Nintendo product for it to happen, which probably isn’t of much interest to them.
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Why sell only one flavor of cookie at your cookie store when you can sell all the flavors?
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I live in a small town in Washington (~10k population) and they removed the vending machine from the Fred Meyer over the Summer which had been here for several years. Probably to bring it to a bigger city. I’ll be honest though that I never used it because buying online pre-covid was considerably less expensive than the vending machine prices. And the prices in the Fred Meyer itself were less expensive too…
But yeah I’ve been to NYC and as PichuFan said the Nintendo store there is the old Pokemon Center. I bought a chespin hat there so they stock some Pokemon goodies.
They could open one on the west coast but real estate is extremely expensive and SF, LA, SEA, etc doesn’t get the tourism foot traffic that NYC gets.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_international_visitors
According to this wiki NYC gets almost double the international visitors as LA. Even Las Vegas and Miami rank ahead of LA. SF about half of LA and SEA doesn’t even rank.
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They have a section dedicated to pokemon on the 2nd floor it’s basically the equivalent of 1/4 of the store
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They have over a dozen dedicated stores in Japan, seems like one in the U.S. could certainly be in their idea book.
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Pokémon could have a direct to consumer strategy through the Pokémon Center website, and not distribute through the Walmarts of the world. Would take away atleast 1, if not 2 middle men.
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To put this mildly, no. To put it more optimistically, probably no.
There were many supposed reasons as to why the og Pokemon Center NYC shut down, all of which of course arent going to be 100 percent factual due to most of these claims being held by former employees who may or may not have had to full story as we know TPC likes to hide a lot of that information. With this, one of the claims was that TPC wasnt happy at all with how the US side of pokemon was running the operation, and theres also rumor that it was actually a test run for future stores to open up across the US if it were to go well. But with claims of employees stealing merch and other various claims to that degree, they decided on just nixing the idea altogether which then led the the Nintendo Store we have today in its place and as much as this cannot be 100 percent determined, the information does in fact make sense when you look back to that time period of pokemons history.
Thing is, with todays climate of how heavy the demand of Pokemon is and with all the craziness thats already happened In the US and worldwide, it just doesnt seem like something that makes sense anymore for them to do. The online store thats available to all of us is for sure enough as is, and with businesses being far more online oriented as is opening a storefront again id say would be out of their best interest. The same too could be said about people in the card world wanting to open up storefronts in the US as well: it just doesnt seem as if its necessary or would provide enough of a demand to be consistently stable. It would be nice of course to have that magic again and to be able to go to something completely Pokemon related, but at the same time I just dont think it would have that same appeal that it once did because of how it would be treated by customers. So in that regard, I think all we may see are small pop up shops or maybe kiosk-esq openings which weve already seen happen here or there.
and my major takeway as usual from this type of summary: Leave it to people to ruin a good thing.
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Something along these lines seems to be a real big driver of why not. I mean, they have 15 stores in Japan, 3 over a decade old and 3 more in the 7+ year range. The idea that they would have some in the US because they do in Japan falls apart with your reasoning, so I can see that. If TPCI and the TPC are not seeing eye to eye on the operational characteristics, then im sure TPC would pull out.
Exactly lol. And hey i mean id love for new ones to be instated and come about, but as I said theres def good arguments against it. But with anything, you never really do know for sure so I still wouldnt close the door on the idea for the possibility regardless even if i do think it wouldnt be a thing again.
One other thing that could be mentioned is that I do also think Japans culture plays a huge role in this as well, as when you compare there to here its vastly different in how we each treat such venues too. Speaking as a huge merch collector, its very apparent that here there are very few kids/adults who are deep into those worlds, and those products would of course be the main driver of the Center as it outweighs the majority volume wise for the store as a whole. Theyd have to be able to move countless amounts of product, but also still be able to have customers coming back for things that arent just the tcg, as to replicate whats in japan it needs that mix and needs to be able to move x amount to pull in the revenue they need while also employing people, pyaing for the space, etc etc (i also am just guessing this, but sounds smart and makes sense right? lol). So being Japan is very merch heavy and super well maintained by both its customers and businesses, i think that model there works very well whereas here it just wouldnt be sustainable, as is proven by most toy stores and such kind of falling apart in the past 20 years or so. Just another random point of interest to maybe through out there, but also a fluid one as its all just speculation at the end of the day.
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All I know is I’m always envious when I see members photos from when they visited the New York pokemon center. I’m glad there is at least a Nintendo store today. I think a pokemon center could do well in the us, it’s just about cost and location.
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Be careful for what you wish for. As everyone knows, the Pokemon Center online store here in Japan uses a one-per-customer lottery for pretty much every TCG release nowadays. 
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Since I go to Nintendo NY pretty’s often, I notice that the only things that sell well are the cards and plushies for Pokémon. Most of the time the cards are out of stock though and they even limit cards to 2 each per item, and they still sell out quickly. Financially I don’t see it being plausible in the U.S.
The model for Nintendo NY is great since it dives into all franchises within their brand. All I can think of when imagining a Pokémon center in NYC is overpriced giant plushies that sit on the shelves since the majority of shoppers don’t want to spend over $120 on one (also having to walk around with a huge gigantimax pikachu plushie in the city doesn’t sound fun).
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I just wanted one in the European Union so I could not get screwed by Customs
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