Tony Reid’s weekly Shop Talk segment focuses on the goings-on at the hobby shop he helps manage in Central PA.
On the heels of an entertaining All-Star game, we saw a nice, steady stream of new basketball products hitting our shelves.
First up was 2020-21 Revolution. It made it’s debut this past week and has showed solid sales out of the gate. The eight packs per box offer four rookies, four inserts and eight parallels, so it packs a nice punch.
We also managed to secure a very limited quantity of 2020-21 Donruss Choice Basketball. With two autos in a 10 card box, they offer some potential heat as well.
One of our regular big spenders Dave and his son Zach we’re in opening some boxes mid week. They started with 2020 Plates and Patches Football. Zach opening the first box that left a lot to be desired. The autograph was retired Colts great Dwight Freeney and the one of one printing plate was Saints rookie Zack Baun. Yes, those were the highlights.
Dave said to leave it to dad to show the youngster how it was done, so he ended up opening a second box of Plates and Patches. He had far better luck, pulling a Peyton Manning 1 of 1 printing plate and a beautiful Chase Young RPA.
The father son duo ended with a few boxes of 2020 Leaf Rookies & Stars Football that didn’t yield much to write home to mom about.
We would be remiss if we didn’t touch on baseball as 2021 Donruss hobby found its way to the shop this week. We had them at a more than fair price, as they were flying off the shelf.
Later on in the week we had two gentlemen in their mid-30s come in asking a number of questions about breaks. We hadn’t seen either guy in the store before and from the conversation it appears as though they’re just getting into the hobby and apparently they want to do it by doing breaks. They walked out with the heat, including a few higher end football boxes from the current year, so I guess we will see how it goes for them.
While I am on the topic, we do supply a few of the local breakers with a good number of boxes on a pretty regular basis. There is another breaker in town who runs a successful program who we supply from time to time. There’s also a young college kid who started coming in in recent months who does Pokémon breaks and we have been able to supply him as well. So, even with her somewhat limited quantities and allocations of boxes, we do what we can to keep local breakers in business.
In our weekly segment of “just looking at each other and laughing” please see the 1990 Impel Marvel cards. These were cards that people brought to the shop to try to sell countless times over the years and for the longest time they had little to no value. We had a customer come in that had gone through an acquaintance’s collection and came across a wide variety of comic books and non-sports cards and these were included. After doing a very quick check on eBay, we were shocked to see that boxes are now selling for around $1,000 and in some cases much more than that. We purchased a box from said customer and they sold by the next morning for over $1,000. Madness.
That’s one of the most magical things about the hobby at the moment. To just see the incredible values of some cards that, over the years, had little to no value. It definitely keeps us on our toes and makes things exciting. Certain days feel like we’re on the stock market floor.
Thanks for checking back in. I’ll be in touch again soon.
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