The sun was shining nearly every day last week and so were the new Prizm basketball cards.
Sales have been phenomenal–so much so that we even had a group of young guys come in earlier this week and tell us war stories about trying to find the elusive beast out in the wild in retail locations. We’ve all heard the stories by now about lines of people 20 to 30 deep waiting for the shelves to be stocked as if it were Black Friday. We’ve heard about people sleeping in their cars and even in tents in parking lots.
Well, the stories, at least in our area, have turned into WWE pay-per-view match potential as we heard this week about the situation at a local retail establishment that came to blows between two guys over blasters and hangar boxes. From what we heard, there were a few fists flying and even the dreaded body slam involved.
Although we do sell a good bit of WWE merchandise at the shop and I personally spent a lot of time in MMA, we try to avoid all of that when it comes to cardboard purchases. No steel chairs are needed to grab a box of product off of our shelves.
Not only did we get our hands on some Prizm, we also restocked some previous year’s basketball cards including some nice hobby and retail boxes from 2019-18 all the way back to 2012-2013. Obviously the price we paid to get these back in our store with much higher than the price listed on the retail boxes. What we wouldn’t all give to travel back in time and pick up blasters for $9.99.
Although we are technically not in football season, cards from the gridiron are still selling well. 2020 Select Football dropped this week and it has been selling phenomenally for us. Hobby boxes have been selling briskly in store and we’ve sold more than one case online in the past few days. Interestingly enough, PWCC purchased the entire supply of Select that we had offered online.
Speaking of football, we have been selling boxes of 2020 Encased for north of $700 online regularly. We have a limited supply of the one card per box product but buyers are gobbling them up.
Pre-sales are brisk on upcoming football due to the first cards of QB Phenom Trevor Lawrence that will arrive with them.
As far as fun walk-ins this week, we had one of our regular baseball customers bring in a 2000 Fleer Autographics Tom Brady auto rookie year card. His landlord had it in a random box of Michigan football cards, as he was a big fan of the Wolverines back in the day.
He bought it a long time ago–and as you can imagine he paid way less than it’s worth these days. We want to do our best to verify authenticity as there were a number of reprints of this card, so we did our due diligence in trying to give the best advice we could to our customer.
As I try to cover all bases, so I’ll mention that we purchased a huge lot of singles and sets from the baseball junk era this week. It’s not all so much junk anymore. There is gold to be found if you dig deep enough. We picked up a bunch of stuff from 1985 through 1992 looking for those nuggets.
Another ball I’ve been trying to keep in the air during my juggling act is a weekly podcast. Simply stated, it’s me having conversations with elite athletes about their involvement in sports cards and memorabilia collecting. Many of them can be found in written form right here on Sports Collectors Daily but let me throw out a shameless plug and ask you to hop over and listen to my podcast as well. Off Center with Tony Reid is available here.
I believe that’s it for now. Be sure to check in next week to see if we can pass along any more stories of pile drivers and power slams in the aisles of your local department store.
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Shop Talk: Price Barrier Concerns, Restocks and a Young Vintage Card Fan
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
Shop Talk: Red Hot Releases and Road Trip Interviews
