I'm younger than a lot of people here. I bought trading cards in the early 80s through the early nineties. Originally, I was in first or second grade when I bought Wackys at the local gas station. They were 25 cents a pack. Basically, my Dad would let us kids pick out a candy bar or something similarly priced every time we went to the gas station, around once a week. I bought Wackys and then later GPKs when those came out a few years later. I also bought other 80s sticker cards like Nintendo or anything that showed up at Big Lots. I also liked those Panini sticker albums and packs of stickers, but I don't think I ever completed one. I was never a set collector, as I had no one to trade with, and I didn't want a bunch of duplicates. I ended up with a ton of GPK because the last 5 or 10 series showed up for 5 cents a pack at Big Lots. I also ended up with a lot of cheap boxes or packs of non-sports because my parents dragged us to a lot of flea markets in the eighties and nineties, where you could find over-produced wax boxes for $3-5 each.
Around 3rd grade, I moved into baseball cards (around 50 cents a pack by then), still around the price of a candy bar, so my Dad let me grab those instead of candy. Soon Upper Deck would come around at the outrageous price of $1/pack and prices got out of control from there.
My Mom would let me get a 75 cent to $1.00 MAD Magazine at the grocery store when a new one came out. New comics were 75 cents each, but I bought all mine used at flea markets and the local comic shop for 25 cents each. I built my MAD/Cracked collection up at garage sales for around 10 cents a magazine, but I digress.
Theoretically, mass produced trading cards like Pokemon should still cost around the price of a candy bar at the checkout counter, which is around $1 today. Instead they're $4-4.50 a pack. They do make 3 card Pokemon packs that they sell at Dollar Tree, and sport cards packs without hits that they sell at Dollar Tree as well (although I haven't seen any since Covid). If they had mass-produced Pokemon sticker cards or Nintendo sticker cards for $1/pack next to the candy bars at the grocery checkout, I guarantee a lot of kids would want those (and a lot of adults as well). Stickers have more utility than normal trading cards as you can slap them on your locker, skateboard, binder, etc. I'm not really sure why they died off.
