Reid offers his weekly dose of happenings inside Sports Zone, the Central Pennsylvania shop where he works.
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This week offered up a big baseball card release 2022 Topps Series 1 Baseball hit our shelves bright and early Wednesday morning.
The shop had four or five missed calls from the night before and early that morning before we even opened the door from collectors all inquiring about when our stock would be available.
Once we opened, I had a few more calls on top of the handful of people who had already left their names and numbers for me to reach out to as soon as it arrived. I tried to do my best to make sure that those who had called and left their information got what they were looking for. I’d much rather make sure that a large number of our regular customers are happy and can at least get some product and enjoy it as opposed to one random person coming in and buying us out to just flip for profit. Like I’ve said many times before, we will sell to anybody, of course, but we want to support those that support us throughout the year, each and every day.
A few minutes after opening the door our first customer asked for… you guessed it…2022 Topps Series 1 Baseball. He purchased a single Hobby box and the floodgates opened from there. Throughout the day I sold a large number of Hobby and Jumbo boxes. We have yet to open any for packs as the boxes are selling fast enough and the demand seems to be for full boxes and not so much individual packs at the moment. If our supply holds steady, I’m sure we will open boxes for packs at some point soon.
Everyone who inquired got what they wanted and we have a small number of both Hobby and Jumbo offerings left on the shelves as I write this heading into the current week.
We also got a current year basketball product in stock this week with 2021-2022 Donruss Elite Basketball. We had a customer who was in as we got it off the truck and he cracked a box on the spot. The design of Elite is different this year which was fun to see. He hit a lot of big name player inserts including multiple Steph Curry cards, a few nice LeBron James inserts and some decent rookies.
As we stood there shooting video of Dave opening his box, we had another regular customer come in (an assistant basketball coach at local university) who also picked up a box of Elite. He saw Dave opening his box and said “I want one of those!” He took that other products with him, so we didn’t see what that particular box contained.
I haven’t been a huge fan of the card design, collation and selection in past years but I’m really digging Elite Basketball this year. Not only is it an upgrade, it’s also only the second or third current year basketball product that features this year’s rookies in NBA uniforms, so it’s a perfect storm for the brand to grab some market share and shine in what is otherwise a desolate ghost land of a complete lack of current year NBA products.
We did receive a more variety of 2021-22 Hoops Basketball product in this week including a few cases of blasters and some really nice retail boxes. We opened up a blaster in store for singles and as a video for some content for our website and we actually pulled a Stacey Augmon autograph, which from a blaster, is next to impossible. It was great to see some ink for ‘The Plastic Man’.
We also had a few solid rookies and inserts, including a really nice SLAM Allen Iverson cover, so at least from our experience, Hoops blasters are where it’s at right now if you are looking for a current year NBA basketball product without spending a fortune.
It was great to have another solid week of sports card releases to offer our customers. We carry products in a number of other areas and categories but ultimately this is why I come to work every day.
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