It was a steady stream of delivery trucks dropping off boxes all week but one in particular had me fired up. Our latest shipment from Panini arrived–a full skid of new products that we expect will be of strong interest to our customers.
The cases held every version of 2022-23 Optic Basketball and 2022 Optic Football and we ripped them open to fill our shelves and our back room storage area.
While we’re a “hobby” shop in every sense of the word, I’d much rather look at those than toys and remote control car parts.
Those weren’t the only new arrivals, though. I mentioned in last week’s ST piece about how great the pricing is on 8-10 year-old football products compared to some of the more recent boxes. We’ve been scouring eBay and the rest of the interwebs, picking up any solid deal we find on “older” football boxes.
We’ve bought a bunch for the store but we couldn’t help breaking some ourselves and we’ve hit some nice cards out of them, including a Philip Rivers RPA out of 2004 SP Authentic Football.
After I left Friday, shop owner Jason pulled a 2007 Calvin Johnson Playoff Contenders rookie auto that he had just brought in.
I try to keep up with the amount of boxes we break in the store and add to my Brief Box Break Inventory here on SC Daily but sometimes we just rip them quick and we’re off to the races before the phone comes out. That definitely happened when we got the 2022-23 Bowman Chrome University Basketball product in Friday afternoon.
Of course we were hunting for Victor Wembanyama. I opened a box and although I didn’t hit one, I had a number of really nice Caitlin Clark cards including a low numbered parallel version of one of the most talked about women’s players of all-time.
Jason decided to open a box and definitely one upped me as he pulled a Big Kahuna Clark autograph numbered to 150 out of the second pack from the box he opened.
Quickly realizing that even the Wembanyama base card was an SP, found only one per case, on average, we decided to keep ripping.
I opened a second box to no avail but Jason hit big in the second box he opened, pulling the Wembanyama, which is currently selling for around $1,000. Personally, I’m a big fan of short printing the base rookie cards because after all, that’s what I collect and as anyone knows, so many of the modern era rookie cards are practically worthless because there’s so many printed and there are so many parallels. To have a somewhat rare and valuable base card (and some guaranteed value) is, in my opinion, not the worst thing in the world.
One of my best friends and one of our new customers (now that he lives in the area), Neil, sent his first few cards out to PSA for grading through us, and they finally came back this week.
He sent some iconic quarterback rookie cards, including a Topps Aaron Rodgers rookie, a 2000 Victory Tom Brady rookie, and a few others. The Rodgers came back an 8. The Brady came back labeled miscut, but it was not slabbed, which didn’t make sense to me because PSA clearly grades and slabs miscut cards and adds the qualifier, so I have to do a little digging into that one.
He also sent a few modern QB rookie cards, and it paid off when he got a nice PSA 10 gem mint grade on his 2020 Select Die-Cut Joe Burrow RC. That definitely made him happy and even though the Brady and Rodgers came back questionable, ultimately he had pulled those cards from packs, so it was just as much of a nostalgic thought to get them graded as anything. He wins either way.
I left work a few hours early on Friday to drive to Altoona to attend my son’s high school graduation. I now have two children who are high school graduates. I’m getting old.
I was back in the shop Sunday to get caught up heading into a very busy Monday.
I hope everyone has a great upcoming week. I’ll check back in soon.
Related Stories:
Shop Talk: Beyond the Cardboard, Wishing for Wembanyama, “Dog Water”
Shop Talk: Work/Life Balance, No Wemby for Us, Young Dealer’s Act of Kindness
Shop Talk: Wembanyama Wonderland, Phillies Phinished, Tragic News for Young Customer
Shop Talk: Hobby Rip Night, Population Control, New Look Mini Helmets
Shop Talk: Price Barrier Concerns, Restocks and a Young Vintage Card Fan
Shop Talk: Prizm, Pre Sales and Power Slams
Shop Talk: One Last High School Game, Tons of New Card Releases, Job Juggling Car Accident, “Tenbanyama”
Wembanyama’s Summer League Debut Jersey Bringing 5-Figure Price
