Tony Reid’s weekly Shop Talk segment focuses on the goings-on at the hobby shop he helps manage in Central PA.
Last week started with a bang in what has been the worst snow storm of the season for us. We got hit with a good old nor’easter that threw down over a foot and a half of snow in a relatively short period of time. We actually had our storefront closed both Monday and Tuesday this week due to the weather conditions. Honestly, that meant very little because we are constantly busy fulfilling orders from our eBay store to the tune of hundreds and hundreds per day, regardless of what Mother Nature or Old Man Winter have in mind.
As one might imagine, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs items have been hot across the board, from cards to jerseys to mini helmets and everything in between. We filled a large number of orders over the past few weeks for the Super Bowl contenders.
As hot as those teams and their products are, it would be tough to top the heat of the newly released 2020-21 NBA Hoops. We managed to secure a few cases from our distributors and they sold immediately online for north of $8,000 a piece. We did keep a few boxes and opened them for packs in the store and people were eating them up like candy.
Being a traditional base rookie card collector as I am, I’m always excited to see flagship products such as Hoops released each season. It only took a few packs to see our first Anthony Edwards rookie card. The customer was pretty happy as they are already selling for a premium online. We got about halfway through the first box before we saw our first LaMelo Ball RC. By the time various customers got to the bottom of the box, another Edwards was pulled. It was a nice numbered parallel that was already bringing over $200 in online auctions.
Earlier this week we also got the new TriStar Hidden Treasures Game Day Greats autographed football jerseys in stock.

One of our baseball diehards and longtime customers, Mr. Troutman, was in this week and picked up 2020 Leaf Metal Draft and the new Donruss Elite Extra Edition baseball. He’s probably our biggest baseball card customer and over the years he’s generally picked up one box of everything we would get in baseball related. That is no exaggeration. On this particular day, he had the Jasson Dominguez hand picking up a numbered jersey in Elite Extra Edition and an auto of the Yankees top prospect in the Metal product. He was very happy and so were we.
It didn’t feel much like baseball season this week but by the time Friday and Saturday rolled around the weather got a touch warmer and some of those massive piles of snow started melting. I guess baseball season is right around the corner after all. I’m ready for pitchers and catchers.