Tony Reid chronicles the happenings inside Sports Zone, the Central Pennsylvania store where he works.
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With the shop’s owner again traveling out of state, we were in charge of keeping the ship from heading into any potential icebergs or even choppy waters for that matter. 
One of the more heartwarming and sweet stories of the week was when I noticed a note one buyer had included with an eBay order for a 2022 Panini Limited Football box. The purchaser of the box wanted to add a handwritten note to inspire and uplift a young man who was battling cancer. I was more than happy to write the note and we at Sports Zone wish him all the best in his recovery and journey moving forward. Its beautiful when sports and sports cards can bring light to a person’s life and brighten up their day. That’s what its really all about.
Earlier in the week, we had a customer walk through the door that I don’t remember ever seeing in the store before. She initially asked about the value of Pete Rose cards and, as we all know, there are thousands upon thousands of Rose cards from 50 years, with the price totally dependent on the cards she had and the condition. She left and a few minutes later she brought in a binder full of random cards in nine pocket pages. I was about eight to ten pages in when I realized the cards looked very familiar. I quickly realized it was the exact binder that I had dropped off at Goodwill earlier in the week. Needless to say, I wasn’t interested in buying the cards I had just donated.
It was a wonderful week for buying collections. I finally caught up with an old friend and met with his father and a family friend who was the guy who had a collection from his childhood. I had been hearing about it for a few years and we had made multiple attempts to meet up and it was great that we could finally make it happen. The man, a pastor from out of town, brought his collection up for me to check out on my lunch break Tuesday afternoon. We sat and reminisced and talked about old players and I could see his love of the game and love of sport shining through in our time together. It was more than the cardboard in front of us, it literally was his childhood and teen years in paper form.
He was a big basketball fan and fondly remembered his favorite teams and players and even pointed out a few names that I wasn’t very familiar with and that’s saying something. There were cards from the late 60s through the 1970s…many well loved but some of the the names were nothing to sneeze at either.
He ended up selling his entire collection to me on the spot, except for a few special cards that I made sure he kept. There were early 1970s baseball, basketball and football cards, including a few key rookies such as two 1976 Topps Walter Payton rookies, a 1970-71 Pete Maravich rookie, a number of other early tall boys and early to mid career Lews (Kareems), late career Wilts and other greats. I spent the better part of that evening sorting, organizing and coming across a few gems. Most importantly, I had a wonderful interaction with a great guy and a great family and I’m very happy to now own his childhood collection.
This week also saw a few people walk in with cards to sell. I came in after my lunch break on Friday to about ten Amazon and other similar shipping boxes of smoky, smelly cards on the floor. Co-worker Felix proceeded to tell me that someone had dropped them off and left their phone number and wanted me to see if I was interested in buying the lot.
I made it pretty well through the boxes and there wasn’t much value to speak of. It was boxes filled with boxes of blasters, all kinds of other retail and just a hodgepodge of mishmash cards. The customer came back in and as I started to stack the boxes on the counter he said he really didn’t want to take them home, so I managed to snag them for a price I could certainly live with. I’m now in the process of organizing and breaking down this collection, too…and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.
As most weeks are, it was a fun week for new releases that included 2023 Bowman Baseball hobby and jumbo boxes.
We sold out of our few cases of jumbo within minutes but we still have a few hobby boxes on the shelves. We also got the new 2022 Panini Contenders Optic Football, UFC Prizm hobby (with collectors Hasbulla hunting) and a few other nice new products.
One of the not so heartwarming stories of the week was what I will now refer to as our soccer scam. Our “Customer of the Week” returned a full hobby box of 2022-23 Donruss Soccer completely opened, stating on his eBay return slip that they came “damaged.” This person literally opened every single pack, stacked the cards back in the box and returned them.
Well, I can tell you because I want to through every single card and nothing was damaged. The actual hobby box wasn’t damaged and neither was the box we shipped the box of cards in. He’s a buyer you’ll want to block if you sell on eBay. I can only remember having this happen once or twice before in my entire time at the store. The vast majority of folks in the hobby are good, but as evidenced here, some people have no scruples.
The week felt like it flew by so after a Saturday morning and afternoon at the shop, I was looking forward to spending Sunday at home… telling you all about my week at the shop.
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