Last week was a busy one in the shop–and in the area.
We received a nice quantity of 2020-21 Select Basketball hobby boxes mid week. We had a few cases and loose boxes and we pieced it out completely and listed individual boxes online. They were sold out within 48 hours of us receiving them.
We also saw the anticipated 2021 Gold Standard Football bricks arrive in store this week. This product always seems to be a hit with collectors as we, personally, have always found really good bang for the buck with what we’ve seen opened over the years. With a box shaped like a gold bar, it’s quite unique.
One of our best football pack and box buying customers, Noah, opened a box right in front of us this week. He hit a nice Tom Brady numbered card out of the gate. He then got a very nice Hall of Gold low numbered Thurman Thomas multi colored jersey piece. He pulled a numbered jersey card of Patriots rookie quarterback Mac Jones, a Brandin Cooks Jersey and a Golden Debut autograph numbered to just 25 copies of Heisman trophy winning wide receiver and Philadelphia Eagles star rookie Devonta Smith. Noah is a big Eagles fan so this hit couldn’t have been much better if he hand picked it himself.
Sticking with the football theme, we also received various amounts of various 2021 Chronicles Football products- from blasters to fat packs to hobby boxes and everything in between. Although it’s a lower end product with not a ton of upside, it is an early rookie card release utilizing a hodgepodge of Panini product brand names all wrapped (literally) in one. At times, it makes my head hurt opening packs but its entertaining and fun at the same time. I’m torn.
An interesting, behind the scenes moment from this past week was the phone call from one of our distributors offering up a spreadsheet of the various baseball, basketball and football products they had in stock and for sale. Shop owner Jason, fellow employee Kyle and I each took a sheet and did some quick comp checks with what the products listed on the spreadsheet were selling for online on eBay and various sites.
We quickly realized that the vast majority of the products on the spreadsheet could be found cheaper, sometimes far cheaper, on eBay.
After realizing this, the owner called the distributor back with our findings. The distributor informed Jason that although the prices were high, many other shops were buying the products at these inflated rates assuming they would be selling for that or more in the coming weeks. Although that may wind up being true for some of them, it definitely wasn’t for others and we ended up placing a relatively small order.
On one hand, I completely understand that as the market continues to rise, some products dry up and will increase in price and that’s why we did bite on a few of them. Then there was a tier of products that, knowing the rookie classes, would probably never go down in value so even if they were a tad high we took those. Then then there was a third tier of product that had just an absolutely ridiculous price point. So much so that they will probably never reach that height again. We waded through the spreadsheets and ordered what makes sense for us. It was interesting to hear that apparently other shop owners are buying high–maybe too high– in anticipation (or hope) of the tide rising week over week.
As I mentioned at the end of last week’s piece, there was a card show at our local Susquehanna Valley Mall over the weekend. Luckily, I was off on Saturday so I took my young daughter down bright and early and we made the rounds around the show. She couldn’t have been any better so I managed to spend some time with a number of our customers who had their own tables at the show.
My second cousin Dave, who is a hobby lifer and a second generation card shop guy, had tons of vintage on display. Two of our good customers from the area had a table with various football set up to sell. As I was looking around someone came up and bumped me and it turned out to be a kid who I coached in basketball years ago who spent time in the hobby, left and recently got rejuvenated to the point of trying to make it go but in the business himself. He’s one of several people I’ve known over the years who are trying to make it in the business.
It was a really nice show with a good turnout and a wide variety of offerings from 30-plus tables. The National it wasn’t, but it was a great event for our area and nice to see shows to not only be more prevalent around the country, but attracting a steady stream of customers, both new and old.
It was a great start to the weekend to share the show with my daughter. She was legitimately excited to see some baseball and football cards even though she slept through the majority of the experience. After all, she had Frozen cards waiting for her at home.
Have a great week. I’ll check back in soon.
