Tony Reid offers his weekly dose of happenings inside Sports Zone, the Central Pennsylvania shop where he works.
Day after day and week after week, we can feel the holiday season approaching. Our back room continues to fill up more each day, getting closer and closer to its breaking point. Concerns about the potential that we might not get enough product come holiday season with all of the issues we are hearing about with containers and freight overseas, we’ve been forced to order and now store even more inventory than usual, which is really saying something.
Many of our vendors and suppliers in all facets of our business warned us to stock up early with the looming supply chain issues. Upper Deck has already cancelled a couple of planned releases and delayed its biggest seller. We will see how this all plays out in the days, weeks and months to come. That topic may be a Shop Talk piece unto itself come late December or early January.
It’s a great time of the year to be a sports fan with baseball, football, basketball and hockey games going on virtually every day, but here’s hoping basketball card sales pick up again soon, as they have really been lagging lately. The NBA season has just tipped off and obviously, when a sport is on live television, online and in season it becomes top of mind for collectors. The cards of high performing players will heat up and sell…we hope. As we’ve seen in recent years, it only takes a good game or two to see a player’s cards start to catch fire with frenzied speculation. Gary Trent, Jr. anyone? If you’re Bol Bol it only takes a windmill dunk in practice for your cards to sell.
Many of our Steph Curry cards have begun to move this week with the anticipation of another MVP like season from the greatest shooter in NBA history. We sold a few Curry rookies, memorabilia cards and inserts in store and online.
2021 Donruss Football continues to sell well for us in all varieties- from hobby to blasters to cellos to hangers and every other shape, form and fashion. If they made three card packs of Donruss Football wrapped in a garbage bag, I’m pretty sure we could sell it.
We’ve also made a concerted effort to buy some 2017 and 2016 football products to restock our bare shelves. We managed to pick up some 2017 Donruss Optic, Absolute and some other fine products for our customers to consider. We scored some nice offerings from 2017 for the chance to land a Patrick Mahomes, Christian McCaffrey, Alvin Kamara, T.J. Watt or one of the other 15 star rookies in this class but you will have to pay for that opportunity as not much in 2017 is cheap.
We stocked up on 2016 Prizm and Optic Football for the really nice selection of rookie cards. With Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott being hot as well as the Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry proving he might be the best football player on the planet. 2016 stuff is on fire and tougher and tougher to come by.
We sell a large amount of Imports Dragon sports figures and with the Major League Baseball postseason being in full swing, we’re seeing players like Cody Bellinger, Clayton Kershaw, J.D. Martinez, Jose Altuve and other figures of playoff stars selling on a regular basis.
Well, that’s about all the time I have for this week. Time to get back to shipping and receiving.
Have a great rest of the week and I’ll check back in again soon.
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