Tony Reid chronicles the happenings inside Sports Zone, the Central Pennsylvania store where he works.
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This week, we saw what would be the last of the customer with the incredibly large sports card collection for sale. Long gone are the four and five row boxes. Now in recent trips, we’ve been seeing the small shoe boxes, the 100, 200 count boxes full of random, dusty warped junk era cards. The collection definitely weakened and faded each time more cards were brought in. We eventually got to the point where we literally didn’t buy anything on his last trip in and that was as the end of the line.
It was definitely fun while it lasted but as it went on… and on… and on, we saw less and less quality stuff. It became very time consuming with no real return on our end. As much as I love looking at cards, it did become a chore. That, coupled with the fact that there was really no money to be made, it turned out it wrapped up at a good time.
As a huge baseball fan, I’m really happy to see the World Baseball Classic in full swing. It’s a beautiful thing to see so many great teams fielded from so many countries around the world. There is such a great amount of talent, lot of it coming from familiar faces in MLB. It’s also great to see how passionate the fans and attendees are for each game. I’m trying to soak in each inning I can, after my daughter is in bed for the night.
Speaking of passionate baseball fans, we sold through the remainder of our 2023 Topps Series One selection.
The only thing left in the lineup were our retail boxes, which, for whatever reasons, sold out very quickly over the weekend, mainly via Walmart. Walmart was also good to us on our 2022 Topps Chrome Lite boxes, as we sold huge quantities over the weekend and are now left with just our open box and store. We generally don’t sell a huge percentage of our inventory on Walmart but every so often Wally World hits a grand slam for us.
We sold through the remainder of our initial inventory of 2022 Donruss Football H2 Hybrid boxes. The vast majority of those sold on eBay for about a $122 per box.
Some customers or negative nellies turn up their nose at the box and pack prices on our shelves. Although we remain consistent as the lowest price anywhere, they truly don’t believe what we pay for some of these products. Here’s a pretty solid example of the pricing we encounter. We purchased a box of 2022-23 Hoops Basketball for a $119. The invoice shows an SRP of a $120.
We always like to match lowest prices on eBay and right now there’s a box of this product for $120 with $4.99 shipping. We would lose money to sell this product of this price. Luckily we can get a few more dollars than that but with margins like that, we might well not even bother buying certain products. Clearly this isn’t an across-the-board type of situation but it does happen more often than many may realize, so I just wanted to show you first hand there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone on some of the new releases and definitely not a lot on any reorders.
With shop owner Jason on his way back out of town I worked Saturday when a young athlete from out of town called us. He was in town for a tournament at a local college and wanted to stop by the shop and check it out. He walked in with a younger kid, who I’m assuming was a younger brother. The older young man with super personable and was excited to see my dollar box and five dollar box on the counter. He even bought one of Jason’s entire three row 50 cent card boxes. He told me that he coaches youth sports and hands cards out as prizes and rewards, which was great to hear. I think there may be a bright future for the next generation in our hobby.
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Shop Talk: Being Patient with a New Hire; 1953 Topps Return
Shop Talk: Playing in Pittsburgh
Shop Talk: When Do We Cut Ties with Our Teams?
Shop Talk: Scooping Up Low Cost Gems of Rising Stars and Comeback Candidates
Shop Talk: A Big Week for Sports and Non-Sports Sales
Shop Talk: Remembering a Friend
