it was a great week for shiny new cardboard as there were countless new releases hitting shelves during the last full week of March and plenty of activity both in the shop–and at a nearby show.
I am personally eagerly awaiting Major League Baseball Opening Day this coming week. Thursday can’t get here soon enough. With that in mind, we saw 2021 Topps Opening Day cards arrive at the store this week. It’s a great, affordable product that still offers some pop in the bat, which is exactly what we’re looking for to get (and keep) younger collectors involved in the hobby.
Basketball is in full swing and we also got our first round of 2021 Absolute Memorabilia Basketball boxes which include two autographs and two memorabilia cards per box on average. With Rookie of the Year front runner LaMelo Ball now on the shelf for the rest of the season, I’m curious to see how much that will affect sales for the each product moving forward. This will be the first product that might give us an idea.
With the white hot sports card market and stimulus checks hitting bank accounts, we are still seeing people on a daily basis who are strangers to us dropping between $400 and $1,000 or more on packs and boxes of cards. Its great to see but you can’t help but wonder when this will slow or how it will all play out long term.
Just this week a customer bought a few boxes of 2016 Optic Football, some 2019 football product and a number of other random packs. After talking to him for a few minutes he mentioned that he was a police officer in a town nearby. It turns out he’s friends and co-workers with two of our other regular customers who are officers in the area. It’s always great when those guys come in and support local business and we’re happy to support our local law enforcement.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all there comes a moment each and every week where you find out that is not even remotely true. We had two older gentlemen in the shop buying supplies looking around and just seeing what we had in general. At one point one of them asked if we had any cards of “that basketball player who has every letter of the alphabet in his name.” We quickly realize he means Giannis Antetokounmpo. He had asked if we had any rookie cards of him and when he heard the price of those RCs, he was not a buyer. Everyone wants cards these days, even if they don’t always know the players all that well.
I wasn’t working on Saturday but our local mall had a card pretty good sized show scheduled. Nobody in the shop even knew the show was happening until just a few days beforehand when I happened to see a post on Facebook. As we mentioned it to people throughout the week, it was news to many of them as well. Apparently word had gotten out to more than a few collectors, though. The tables were completely filled, with a number of people left on the outside looking in, wanting to have a booth.
I checked it out bright and early Saturday morning and the place already had collectors wall-to-wall well before the mall tenants had even opened their shops. I saw a number of our store’s customers buying and a few others were set up and selling, so it was a great social gathering with a ton of like-minded people just talking sports cards. There were over 50 tables full, which is a really good number for our little area in Central PA. There were dealers, flippers, buyers and sellers from around the state and out of state.
I stopped by the table of our good buddy Jake Davis and he had some fire in the cases to be sure. He had a really nice 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout BGS 9.5 RC and as I was standing there he sold both his 2018-19 Prizm Luka Doncic PSA 10 RC and a 2019-20 Panini Mosaic Zion Williamson as a tag team for a tidy sum.
I didn’t pick anything up for the shop or for myself personally. When your nearly two year old daughter has an Easter egg hunt later that morning, you’re on a tight schedule.
The hunt was a success and we had a great weekend away from the shop. So I’ll be ready to get back at it bright and early Monday morning.
Thanks as always for checking in. I’ll be in touch again soon.
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Shop Talk: Cold Fronts and Hoops Heat
Shop Talk: Supply and Demand Remains a Challenge for Hobby Shops
Shop Talk: A Big Week for Sports and Non-Sports Sales
Shop Talk: Retail Rules and Baseball Box Busts
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