Pokémon fans bid over $6,000 for seven-year-old Charizard shaped Cheeto

A crisp that happens to look like the pokémon Charizard is about to change hands in a hotly contested bidding war amongst fans.

Pokémon fans must be some of the richest people in gaming, given how willing they seem to be to spend huge amounts of money on related merch. After all, these are the same people that will spend hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds on trading cards.

And yet the current bidding war is not over a particularly rare card or piece of merchandise, but a Cheeto. Not a bag of Cheetos, but a single Cheeto.

Why? It’s because it vaguely looks like the dragon-like pokémon Charizard, which is apparently all it takes for someone to drop over $6,000 on it.

The ‘Cheetozard’ as it’s been dubbed is being sold through auction website Goldin. It was initially discovered by 1st & Goal Collectibles, which normally deals with sports memorabilia, sometime between 2018 and 2022.

Clearly sensing it had a money maker on its hands, 1st & Goal Collectibles preserved the Cheetozard and even gave it a custom-made card framing before selling it for an undisclosed sum to card marketplace Arena Club in 2024.

That November, Arena Club announced on Instagram that one lucky individual would be able to acquire the Cheetozard for themselves by buying a mystery card pack. Whether that person then sold it onto Goldin or someone at Goldin happened to buy the pack is unclear, but now the auction site is looking to sell it on, no doubt to try and turn a tidy profit.

A post shared by Arena Club (@arenaclub)

Bidding began on February 11 and the starting price was only $250 (about £198) but, at the time of writing, it has since rocketed up to $6,250 (£4,940).

Looking at the bidding history, the bids started out fairly small, with each one only bumping the price by $25 or $50. On February 20, though, it shot up from $425 to $700 and subsequent bids were $100 or higher.

For as bizarre as it is for someone to spend thousands of dollars on a crisp, this sort of thing isn’t that uncommon. Whenever any food manages to randomly resemble a famous figure or icon, someone with envious levels of disposable income will drop money on it.

In 2021, in the wake of Among Us’ explosive popularity, a chicken nugget shaped like one of the game’s characters sold on eBay for over £70,000.

The Cheetozard isn’t even the first Cheeto to be auctioned. In 2017, someone paid more than £80,000 on one because it apparently looked like the memetic gorilla Harambe.

As it stands, there’s no telling if the Cheetozard will manage to raise similar figures, but we imagine that’s what Goldin is hoping for. It doesn’t have much time left, though, as the auction is scheduled to end this Sunday on March 2.

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