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Standing under a shade tree at Greenfield Park on Friday, Dominic Carini, 9, was the picture of pre-adolescent summer contentment -- tanned dark as a hazelnut, goofing around with his buddies and just winding up an outing to the Cool Waters aquatic center.
But ask a few questions and you find that not all is perfect in Dominic-land. To be specific, Dominic, who lives in Vernon in Waukesha County and is soon to enter the fourth grade at Clarendon Avenue Elementary School, can't find any Pokemon cards.
He plays the Pokemon video game. He loves the Pokemon cartoon show. But when it comes to tracking down just a starter set of the Pokemon game trading cards -- a 7-month-old product that has created a Beanie Baby-like buzz among preteen boys and the merchants who sell things to them -- he so far has come up empty.
And that has left Dominic, whose search has extended to "like a couple of Walgreens (and) everywhere, basically," a little angry.
"You spend all your time looking for 'em and then you can't find what you're looking for," he said.
Nor can many retailers. The Pokemon game cards, one of the most recent mutations of a marketing juggernaut based on a menagerie of Japanese cartoon creatures, are a runaway, demand-exceeds-supply success.
Stores get only a fraction of the shipments they want. Some merchants have taken to buying cards from other stores, then marking them up to as much as double the suggested price. Kids go from store to store in...