There is a specific kind of silence that follows the sound of a hammer shattering glass in a room full of people who are decorating shiny cardboard with stickers.
A few days ago, I was working at the Poke Court, a Pokémon card store in New York City, when three masked men locked over 40 of us in the room, pointed guns in people’s faces and smashed cabinets to steal valuable cards.
I could already see the headlines forming before the police even arrived: a “$110,000 Heist” and “The Dark Side of the Pokémon Craze” – another chapter in a hobby recently defined in the public eye by Costco fights and $6 million cards on gold chains.
I get why that would be the focus; $110,000 is a number anyone can understand.
But that night wasn’t a high-end auction. It was a free event — our first community arts-and-crafts night where people brought their favorite cards to be decorated with stickers and jewels. If you stop the story at the robbery, you miss the most important part. Where the robbers saw a get-rich scheme, the community saw a home that needed defending.
I don’t work at this shop on top of my “real career” for the paycheck. I work here because 10 years ago, this community performed a miracle for me.
When my father passed away in 2016, I was 23 and suddenly financially responsible for a family I didn’t know how to support. We couldn’t afford a funeral, let alone my mother’s mortgage or my sister’s college tuition. In despair, I wrote a story about the “irrational hope” my dad showed when he worked overtime and skipped meals just to buy me the Charizard cards I craved as a kid.
That story went viral, and the global Pokémon community — hundreds of strangers I will probably never meet — donated enough to a GoFundMe to keep my mom in her home and put my sister through school. They didn’t donate because of the “market value” of my story; they donated because they recognized the specific kind of love that this hobby facilitates.
The people in the store the night it was robbed were an extension of the same community. They were fans who collect plushies of their favorite electric mouse. Elder millennials who collect cards drawn by their favorite artists, even if they aren’t worth piles of money. Content creators who obsess about documenting the minutiae of how many Pokémon toys exist with misprinted spellings from the 1990s. They form communities online and in-person, take roadtrips together, and even attend each other’s weddings.
Seeing men with guns threaten that oasis last Wednesday filled me with a cold kind of anger. But just like in 2016, the community’s response was louder than the shattering glass.
In the minutes after the robbers fled, the silence was replaced by the scratching sound of brooms. Customers grabbed dustpans and began picking up the jagged remnants of the display cases.
By the next morning, our break room was piled so high with boba, donuts and lobster rolls sent by thoughtful strangers and friends of the store that we had to give them away. Carpenters and glassmakers offered to fix the cases for free. Artists reached out to replace our stolen displays with new paintings and woodwork. And, in what felt like a fever dream, Sarah Natochenny, the voice of Ash Ketchum from the Pokémon anime, showed up and brought pizza for everyone in the store.
Even some of the reporters sent to cover the robbery found themselves caught in the pull of the recovery. They were there to document a crime scene, but ended their shifts by leaning over the counter to open a pack of cards, suddenly remembering the Charizards and Blastoises of their own childhoods.
It’s what we see every day at our “Pack Bar,” a counter where strangers from comically different walks of life pull up a stool to open packs together. In a city that can be as anonymous and impersonal as New York, there is something beautiful about watching two people who would otherwise never speak root for one another over shiny cardboard.
In one of my favorite experiences at the Pack Bar, I once saw a father who grew up in the ’90s realize his daughter’s favorite Pokémon matched his own. In that moment, decades of history collapsed into a single smile.
In a time where so many crave a third space, we’ve built one for anyone who has liked anything about Pokémon.
It may feel odd for someone who works at a card store to insist that money isn’t the point, but when you see that shared joy, the “market value” of the cardboard becomes the least interesting thing about it.
The robbery took three minutes. The community rally has been going on for days. Some have loved Pokémon for years, even when it wasn’t popular to do so. Others are newcomers looking for a place to connect. This incident changed none of that. Even if the robbers came back and took every single card in the store, it wouldn’t stop us from sharing our passion.
We’ll keep sweeping the glass. We’ll keep coming back.
Peter Du is a communications professional living in Brooklyn. He collects too many Pokémon cards, is obsessed with new gadgets, doesn’t drink enough water, and serves on the junior board of Make-a-Wish’s Metro New York chapter, where he also grants wishes. He grew up in Kansas and loves his beautiful wife.
The store has a contribution fund here, which is being used to support customers, employees and bring back community nights better than ever before.
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