Tony Reid offers his weekly dose of happenings inside Sports Zone, the Central Pennsylvania shop where he works.
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This week we were in the final stretch of the Christmas shopping season…at least we think we were.
Accordingly, we continued to see a large uptick in in-store traffic. Our online sales continue to surge as well as we walked into nearly 500 online orders Monday morning. There are certain busy days where we have so many packages to go out for shipment that it fills our receiving area and bleeds over into our actual shipping station. Monday was definitely one of those days.
Drawing some inspiration from the wildly popular 2021 Jersey Fusion product, we decided recently to create our own in-store produced blind boxes. We are offering sealed boxes with one PSA 10 rookie card in baseball, basketball and football. We have been actively buying PSA 10s and that, coupled with our already existing inventory, made for a great start to this brainstormed up new product. We are offering the single card boxes for $49.99.
Each and every card is a true rookie or rookie year card of a legitimate current star or retired star. This is an absolute steal considering the fact that you can’t even think about getting a card graded by a PSA for less than $50 right now and you are far from guaranteed a perfect 10 regardless of whether the card is modern or vintage. Not only that, you’re getting a PSA 10 card on the spot, not multiple months later.
In the very short time since we have released our ‘Perfect 10″ boxes, the packs/boxes have been incredibly hot and we’ve sold multiple packs and full cases to various customers.
To be completely honest, there’s a stunning amount of PSA 10s at live auction on eBay for just a few dollars each and every day.
A friend had posted something interesting on Facebook this week. One of our local high school football stars had his first trading card produced recently. Julian Fleming was member of the legendary Southern Columbia High School football team. He holds Pennsylvania state records for both receiving yards and receiving touchdowns and was a five star recruit coming out of high school.
The number one ranked wide receiver in the nation and the 14th best player in the 2020 recruiting class, Fleming signed with Ohio State. A startup company called The Player’s Trunk produced his first card thanks to the NIL deal. It features a sticker autograph and a serial number to just 275 copies. For that price, I had to pick one up for my collection.
The card arrived this week and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s well done and is a nice start for this future stars trading card run.
We had our annual Holiday Party after the shop closed Wednesday night this week. It was our largest to date–well, technically it was our first actual party. Shop owner Jason had usually just treated my wife and I to a nice dinner in years past. This year, he rented out a local establishment called Coin Taker, which is a nice banquet hall near our store that happens to have plenty of pinball machines. We had a catered dinner, unlimited pinball game usage and great conversation with about 15 of the store’s employees and family members that night.
We had reduced hours of operation on Christmas Eve but that didn’t stop last minute shoppers from darn near beating down our door from the moment we opened till the time we closed. We sold a wide range of products but most notably were the single cards packs of cards and boxes of cards. One gentleman came in and purchased over $4,000 of cards for his two sons to open Christmas morning. He bought our brand new 2021 Flawless baseball case, the brand spanking new 2021 Topps Dynasty box and a few boxes of 2017 football. I’m going to go out and say his kids probably had a pretty incredible Christmas morning.
I sit here writing this piece Christmas evening after our day was wrapped up and I can’t help but reflect on our good fortune at the store and in our personal lives and for that we are eternally grateful. I hope that all of our readers had an amazing holiday filled with family friends and fellowship.
Thanks for reading and I’ll be sure to check back in soon.
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