With nearly five decades of experience in all aspects of sports cards and collectibles, there isn’t much Burbank Sports Cards owner Rob Veres hasn’t seen or done. These days, his newly expanded Southern California shop is an always buzzing mecca of buying and selling. Yet an early embrace of online selling allowed Burbank to grow into one of the biggest online sports card dealers in the world. Veres remains one of the most important and influential hobby shop owners in the industry.
With what started as baseball card transactions with the ice cream man as a young kid living on the east coast to owning an operating one of the largest sports card shops on the planet with an inventory north of 40 million cards, Veres has been in and around the hobby his entire life.
As his influence grows, he continues to blaze new trails, most recently a massive new shop location and events that are putting the west coast back on the hobby show map.
In this interview with SC Daily, “The Cardfather” takes a few minutes out of his busy schedule to talk about his origin story from those ice cream truck transactions to being an early online pioneer in the hobby, his leveling up time and time again and more.
Tony Reid–The story of your introduction to sports cards through the ice cream man while growing up in Massachusetts is pretty well documented. Is there one particular story of the ice cream man that stands out looking back now?
Rob Veres-It was so long ago, being in my mid-50s I don’t recall exactly. I remember having to choose between ice cream and cards. So many kids in my neighborhood collected, I just needed to have a fresh pack or two. You want to collect them all and not be the guy that has just twelve cards. I distinctly remember having to make that choice.
TR–Fred Lynn was your guy and his 1975 Topps RC is one of your favorites. With that being said, what other cards, players and teams did you gravitate toward before moving out west?
RV– I was just a big Boston fan in general. Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrezemski, those Red Sox teams were loaded. It is unfortunate that the A’s, Yankees and the Reds were all around at the same time and all were just as loaded, blocking our path to the title. The Celtics were a big deal to me, too. That was after the days of Bill Russell and those championship runs. We had Havlicek and we had a decent team in the 70s until the late seventies when the wheels came off. Then we had to wait for Bird to come save the day. If you are from Philly, New York or Boston, no matter how far removed you are, that is your team. You could land in LA and think I am a Dodger fan, no. I am still a Boston fan, much to my wife’s chagrin.
TR–Speaking of that life changing move out west at ten years old, you have your version of the story we’ve heard so many times. The collection got left behind and sold cheap. What cards do you remember from that early version of your collection?
RV-I just remember being heartbroken. To be honest, cards were secondary to me. My grandfather got me involved in coins and stamps at a young age and that was actually a bigger passion. Sports cards were a way to pass the summer for me. It wasn’t a year round pursuit at that time. Basketball and football cards came later. Coins and stamps were my thing. Those we brought out west. I was given some cards from the late 60s by some family friends. It feels like I have been making up for it ever since. I am so overcompensating on that. It was tough. My mom had that whole non-essential thing going on. Those were deemed non-essential. It was crushing. I have gotten over it over the years. When you are moving there are certain things you are not allowed to take as a kid.
TR–You were in the business, working in the shop behind the counter from your pre-teen years. How did the experiences, the interactions, the gaining of knowledge how that shaped and formed you for the leveling up in the industry over the years?
RV-I think it goes beyond cards. It was dealing with adults from a young age. It’s not just adults, but adults that collected things that had value to them. I wasn’t selling them shirts. I wasn’t buying irons from them. It was dealing with collectibles and dealing with a lot of money and the trust of somebody who didn’t think twice about anything that I was doing. Whether I was going into the safe, selling things out of the showcases. That was huge. They don’t teach courses in college about dealing with adults in the real world when you are a kid. It matures you really quickly. I paid it forward over the years with the kids I’ve hired.
Back then, it was a different time. He was paying me a dollar and a half an hour, cash. You were making $60 a week during the summer. That was all the money in the world to me. All of a sudden I am making all this money. I am learning the names of all these guys. They all have nicknames. I was part of the crew. You gather all of this knowledge. He trusted me to buy collections. That is the education you just don’t get in college. I worked through my teen years and I dropped out of college at 19 or 20 years old. I just knew what I wanted to do. The parents weren’t exactly psyched. It wasn’t like today where you are travelling all over the country making big money. This was back in 1988. I started Rob’s Cards and Collectibles. I took a different path, let’s put it that way.
TR– That was back in 1989, Ken Griffey Jr.’s rookie year, you opened Rob’s Card and Collectibles. What was the atmosphere in the shop and the mindset as a new owner during the boom of the late eighties and early nineties in the sports card market?
RV-I think it was 1986 when I cut the tether with school. I was still working at the shop and I opened my own business within the shop fully with Rob’s Cards and Collectibles. It was April 1st 1989 when I took the reins of the shop officially. It was still Burbank Coins and Sports Cards. I was still a coin dealer at the time. It was a surreal time. It was prior to the Upper Deck Griffey card. Within the first two weeks we were opened we had the whole 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken thing. It was crazy. People were pissed off you even had the card at the shop. There was national coverage. This was all brand new to me.
Then Upper Deck came in. That wasn’t a home run right away. The cost of packs doubled from 50 cents to $1 per pack. That took the cost of boxes from $15 to $30. That might seem trivial today. They had to prove themselves. It didn’t take long until the Donruss and Fleer sales gave way to Upper Deck sales. The fact that it happened within a few months of me taking over the business was a big deal. We kind of grew up together. It was perfect timing on our part to get into the business fully. There was no looking back after that. I had no other marketable skills. I worked my ass off to make sure I didn’t ever have to work for somebody else again.
TR-You embraced technology in the world and the hobby as fast as anyone. In 1999, you were the first on Beckett Marketplace and had massive growing sales on eBay and elsewhere online. In a hobby that, admittedly, may be a little old and dusty, what made you believe in online early on?
RV-This has always been an archaic industry up until that last three or four years, really. We were so far behind the eight ball. It wasn’t a professional industry, per se. It was a scatter shot of small business owners that didn’t really work together. E-commerce was basically someone creating a want list in New Jersey sending it five days across the country, you receiving that list, you checking your inventory to see if you have those cards with no guarantee that they will be bought, putting them to the side for somebody, writing down pricing, putting them aside for somebody, mailing it back five days then they get the want list back which they may or may not want, they may ghost you. If they do want the cards they will send you a check which is another five days. Then you get the check, wait for it to clear and then send the cards. That was the business. It wasn’t until a fax machine sped things up a bit. You are taking and order that really isn’t even an order, it was a question. That was the business if you decided to do things through the mail and most of them did. It was a tough way to do business but if you don’t know any better it is what it is.
The big call that we got was from Beckett from a guy named Mark Harwell, rest in peace. He was my big brother. He was basically the vice president of Beckett. He had an idea and before he pitched it to Jim (Beckett) he wanted to see if I was on board with it. The thought process was to create an ecommerce site on Beckett.com where you could use the Beckett database to load cards to the site and they would generate the traffic for us to conduct business. Oh my god. I didn’t understand at the time how cool that was because I had never seen Beckett’s database before. I am the first person on there and we were testing it. I can just pull up the 1984 Topps grid, go through my inventory, put in a six, put in a four, a 12 or whatever the quantity is. All of the nomenclature is already there. All of the pricing is already there. I can just push send and these cards are for sale on Beckett.com.
The fact that we were so organized to begin with made it very easy for us to do and a huge competitive advantage. All of a sudden you aren’t waiting five days or faxing things. They are placing an order and actually paying for it. You are shipping it and Beckett is taking care of the back end and taking the risk on the order. It was right around the same time eBay came to be. eBay was 1997 or 1998 but you had to create your own spreadsheets and do all this work. Beckett was far more streamlined and far easier. You weren’t paying per listing. You were paying a flat fee. It wasn’t a lot of money per month and you could load as many cards as you wanted as quickly as you wanted. That was the original game changer for us that made us go from a regional shop to a national shop almost overnight.
TR–You are asked often about a PC. You’ve said that you don’t have one at home, you have a 50 million card collection at the shop.
RV- I don’t want to look at them at home, Tony. I am here on any given day at least 11 to 12 hours. 8AM to 7PM is the norm. There are mornings that are earlier or nights that are later. There are Sundays that I try to take off but I never fully take off. When I get home, I don’t have any cards at home, not a one. You could search my house, you could tear it apart but you won’t find a 2 ½ by 3 ½ piece of cardboard with a dude on it anywhere.
This business is an extended adolescence. I do these little talks in the morning on Instagram. You have a dream job. This is something that everybody else in the industry wishes that they did. I never dread walking in the door and working 11 hours. It’s amazing that some people take it for granted and don’t have a great attitude about it. I just can’t wait to get to work. If I wake up at 5:30, I’m here by 6:00. Whatever time I wake up I’m here within half an hour. You are playing with cards and you are playing with cards you only dreamed of having, buying them from the ice cream man 50 years ago.
TR–If you had a baseball card and we flipped it over, what stats and facts would you want to appear on the back?
RV-The fact that I play drums in a rock band is kind of cool. Maybe the fact that I am part of a three generation family in the business. It’s incredibly rare to have a grandfather, father and son all coexisting in the same business. I think people would find that interesting. Also the fact that I never had another job. Most people come into this industry have done something else for a living. I never have. Having a 44-year run nonstop, in this industry, is pretty crazy. I’m a card dork. I love cards. It’s a true passion.
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