Scarcity is the New Currency
A V spot exclusive meander
Last time out, we did the arithmetic on a football match: eleven grand for a seat, thirty percent clipped by the governing body, and $450 patches of the pitch sold like relics of a saint. I filed it under one bad weekend for the wallet and moved on. Then I looked at what else happened while the grass was being parcelled up, and at what has been happening in the grocery aisle all year, and I no longer think it was a weekend. I think it is the economy now. Two economies, actually, pulling apart in opposite directions, and your customers are living in both at once.
Exhibit A: The $16.5mn piece of cardboard
In February, Logan Paul sold a Pokemon card for $16.49 million at Goldin, the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction, beating the Jordan and Kobe Logoman that went for $12.9 million last summer. He had bought the Pikachu Illustrator in 2021 for $5.275 million, wore it on a diamond chain at WrestleMania, and roughly tripled his money in five years. The buyer was A.J. Scaramucci, a venture capitalist, which tells you the card has completed its journey from playground to portfolio.
And it is not slowing down. This week Retail Dive reports Magic: The Gathering sales are off to what Hasbro cheerfully calls a ripping start. Fanatics Fest just packed a convention centre with Ryan Reynolds buying a Wolverine card and Tom Brady rising from a casket like the Undertaker, which is a sentence I have now typed and cannot untype. Cards, tickets, vinyl, stadium grass. The scarce and the storied are absorbing money at a rate the rest of retail would sell a kidney for.
So, the fair question: is this reserved for celebrities? Participation is thoroughly democratic. The queues at Fanatics Fest, the grading submissions, the card shops reopening in towns that lost their bookshop years ago, the packs moving through Walmart and GameStop: that is a mass market, and it is mostly ordinary people buying twenty quid of hope. But the returns are celebrity-weighted. Paul did not just own that card; he manufactured its story. He wore it at WrestleMania. He livestreamed the sale. His audience was, functionally, the marketing department and the exit liquidity. Celebrity in this market is not a buyer category; it is a minting mechanism. The famous can convert attention into provenance, and provenance is the only yield scarcity pays. The rest of us can play, and genuinely do; we just cannot print the story premium. It is the same asymmetry as the FIFA resale market: everyone can queue, but the platform clips the flow. An open ended auction, live streamed for the next final is not unrealistic.
EXHIBIT B: The basket, meanwhile, is being optimised to death
Walk from the auction house to the supermarket, because the first six months of this year produced the starkest grocery numbers in a long time.
Start with the headline: the slowdown accelerated. Bain and NielsenIQ found grocery unit volumes went negative in February, down around 2% year on year, and stayed there through June, even as prices kept rising 2 to 3%. Fewer things, costing more. And note the date on that inflection: February, when military action against Iran spiked fuel prices. The same Hormuz shock that put a 40% fuel surcharge on your parcels put a dent in the weekly shop. Regular readers will recognise the pattern: one geopolitical event, invoiced twice.
Inside the shrinking basket, the reshuffling is historic. Circana’s midyear data has private label at a record 23.8% of unit share, with store brands out-selling national brands in units in five of six monthly periods this year: national brand units down 0.5%, private label up 0.2%, while national brands took dollar growth of 2.2% by raising prices into declining volume, which is a strategy with a shelf life. McKinsey’s March survey reads like a household under audit: 51% of shoppers cutting impulse purchases, 47% trading into private label, 43% living off promotions, 35% simply delaying, and trips getting smaller and more frequent, up 5%, the shop as a series of precise raids rather than a weekly haul.
PwC now puts a current GLP-1 user in 21% of American households, up from 9% in January 2025, and those households cut grocery spend by around 5.5%. Cornell’s data says the cuts land within six months and hit hardest exactly where the joy lives: snacks, sweet bakery, fast food, the coffee run. The winners are yogurt, fresh fruit, nutrition bars and, gloriously, meat snacks, now a $5.5 billion category growing 6.6% a year, the humble truck-stop meat stick reborn as functional nutrition. Frozen took the single biggest category hit. Trading down it ain’t. Demand itself is being pharmacologically edited, one in five households running an appetite patch.
Add it up: the essential half of the wallet is being optimised by every force we have. Inflation disciplines it, private label commoditises it, the drugs shrink it, and, coming over the hill, the shopping agents will perfect it, replenishing the rational basket with machine precision and zero sentiment. The optimised half of the economy is a solved game, and solved games pay their winners in basis points.
Which is exactly why the other half is going vertical. When the necessary becomes perfectly efficient, the human surplus goes hunting for things that resist efficiency: the seat at the final, the only PSA 10 in existence, the card your childhood remembers, the grass Messi stood on. Scarcity is becoming the new currency because it is the one thing the optimisation stack cannot mint. An agent can find you the cheapest protein yogurt in three milliseconds. It cannot make there be a fortieth Pikachu Illustrator. Kevin Kelly called it years ago: when copies are free and abundant, value flows to what cannot be copied. We are watching that play out in a supermarket and an auction house simultaneously.
For merchants and brands, the practical read: the middle is the killing field. The purely functional gets agent-ised and private-labelled; the genuinely scarce and storied gets bid up by humans spending like it is the last analogue thing on earth. If what you sell is neither the cheapest version of necessary nor a defensible story of scarce, the first six months of 2026 were a memo addressed to you.
One honest caveat before the sign-off, because this column deals in them: the collectibles boom rhymes uncomfortably with 2021, a third of GLP-1 users discontinue and their old baskets come back, and a scarcity premium built on celebrity attention is a premium built on the most inflationary asset there is. The barbell is real; the weights on each end will wobble.
So: the machines get the shopping list, the humans keep the grail hunt, and somewhere in New Jersey a venture capitalist is wearing a Pikachu. The wallet did not shrink this year. It just split in two.
Mind your basket. Both of them.