Magic the Gathering did the same thing. When one company optimizes, the others are sure to follow suit. Love inflation. 
I saw a few days ago that Danny Phantump also confirmed with his distributors English prices are increasing as well. Good stuff. 
At least it’s not a huge increase. But it does suck since you know the prices will never come back down.
Why attribute to inflation what we can instead attribute to corporate greed?
Every number on my bank statement continues to go up except my income
So the floor price for new SV booster boxes (for the regular sets) will only amount to 30 x 180 JPY = 5400 JPY which is only $36.54 in today’s conversion rate. Not a price hike, just a tiny bump to adjust to reality. With the ongoing increase in the value of the USD, the SwSh Booster Boxes at MSRP have been insanely cheap for a while now (4950JPY = $33,48).
This thread is devolving quickly 
Did anyone actually read the post? A booster pack going up 15 yen (10 cents) is corporate greed? Everything else is like a 10% or less increase. Cards in general are almost the same price they were over two decades ago.
I’m gonna delete my post, in honor of keeping those conversations out of this hobby. I’ve had my peace.
Looks like it’ll add a few USD to the Japanese booster boxes, which is in-line with inflation. Not a huge issue for U.S. buyers.
Magic the Gathering has increased prices on their booster boxes and associated products over the past few years. For example, Draft Boxes went from ~$90-100 to $100-110, which isn’t a huge change. However, Collector Boxes and “Specialty Products” have increased more dramatically, and have divided the buyer base. We will have to see whether these types of price increases will translate to Pokemon in the coming years.
Yeah, I mean of course nobody wants to pay more for stuff if you don’t have to. Inflation sucks, but the cumulative inflation rate since 1999 is like 78%. Cards are nowhere near 78% more expensive than they were back then. I’m sure they’re paying a significant amount more in materials and this increase seems totally reasonable and expected.
Agreed, and the people running Pokemon are a bit smarter than those at Wizards of the Coast nowadays.
Just an update on the English prices increases via Danny Phantump:
Looks like a 12.5% increase on booster packs, which theoretically will carry to other products. This basically would bring things in line with the price increases the big box stores already made, so it’s not terrible. Honestly probably worse for an LGS than the buyers.
From my limited understating, Japanese culture is really sensitive to increasing prices and will do anything to keep prices low right?
This amount of increase is completely in line with the amount of inflation in the last two years. Actually, it is less than what inflation would call for. By some measures Pokemon cards are cheaper now than when they first came out.
Base set packs for $3.29 in 1999 would be equivalent to about $5.80 in 2022, according to CPI inflation data. Yet English packs are only increasing to $4.49.
Salaries always lag behind in these inflationary situations, but they absolutely will trend upwards too over time. Salaries will also be held back in the short term by the mild recession.
The issue is that hit rates are so damn low, so increasing the price is just bad for business.
Already there are only like 4 chase cards per set and mountains of ultra rare junk.
I haven’t bought a single pack since returning last year. Singles all the way.
I would buy packs, but it just doesn’t make any financial sense to do so. And not even financial, but odds-wise. It’s a wonder anyone does buy it when you know the odds. This isn’t WOTC or even XY.
But less people buying should theoretically mean higher singles prices. Anyway my point was just that pull rates are objectively awful and they should really increase them.
Indeed
If PkMn was going to take a page from WotC’s playbook, they’d make “collector cards” of all the media promotions that pikachu does throughout japan. And partner for a set with, IDK, star wars, or something. Can we imagine that?!
If pull rates were improved then the chase cards would be more abundant, less valuable, and less desirable. Or, at least the way people view the cards would be dramatically different.
If Moonbreon was almost guaranteed from 2-3 booster boxes, like Base Set Zard was from Base boxes, then it just wouldn’t be as big of a deal to pull it. Some amount of chase and thrill would be lost.
I think TPC is spot on with pull rates. If they are going to print 9 billion cards in a year, then I think it is probably a good thing if some are really hard to pull. That way there is at least some semblance of relative scarcity.
I say this despite opening an entire case of Evolving Skies myself and getting zero alt arts…
Bringing this back to the topic — I think the problem is not the price of packs, nor is it the pull rates. Rather. I think it is a problem of expectations. It is ok for some cards to be statistically unobtainable. Other hobbies have long since adapted to this (especially those with serialized cards). It’s just relatively new for Pokemon.
agree also with @squirtle1000 , it’a a matter of time to have salary going up. Pokemon staff will also see their salary rise or re-adjusted to compensate for inflation. This should take place in all companies.
Sometimes company do not increase price even if inflation is high due to competition. In this case, only pokemon print cards so they can adjust. They could have also increase price much more and people would still buy the products.
The only way to compensate for this increase, is the supply of products and competition with distributors and resellers that could keep prices in check.