This week was another busy one for us here in Central Pennsylvania.
We saw a decent sized snow storm last Saturday, so we took the rare step of closing the shop for the day. The owner beat the bad weather and left for the Carolinas early Friday afternoon. I spent the day with my wife and daughter and even took my new company (remote control) car for a spin in the falling snow in the backyard. I knew with no one being in Saturday that would make for a hellacious Monday for shipping, so I came in Sunday morning a little before 6:00 AM to work on orders for a few hours. I knocked out about 200 of them, then headed home to have breakfast with my girls.
Monday morning was about as hellacious as I imagined as we had nearly 400 orders to take care of– even with me coming in Sunday and trying to ease the pain. I had my Monday morning buddy Zack helping as well as our colleague Traci for a few hours.
We actually started closing to the public Mondays just for the simple fact that we aren’t overly busy in store and the traffic we seem to get seem to be, well, let’s just say… interesting. For whatever reason, Monday is a wacky day, so now we just keep our doors closed and focus on shipping and receiving all day to get caught up from the weekend and get our week off on the right foot.
I was lucky enough to have Zack with me each morning this week with the exception of Friday and Traci came in most of the week and helped out for a few hours each day as well. I was pretty much on my own every afternoon. I really had to put the pedal to the metal when it was necessary. Shipping alone could be a full-time job and when you add in being the lone person on the sales floor all day which, again, could be a full-time job and throw in the receiving and processing aspect of what we do (also enough work for a full-time gig), you can imagine how there are moments where I might have to stop, count to 10 and start again.
Our online stores are pretty well stocked and the orders that come in are testament to that.
Collision of the Sports Seasons
It’s a fun time to be a sports fan as baseball is finally now back in swing. I think we are all ready for that. We’ve had a lot of people in the store excited for the season and looking ahead to upcoming 2022 baseball card releases.
NCAA March Madness is in full effect, so we like to have that on our big screen at the shop each day. Speaking of basketball, the NBA regular season is winding down and the playoff picture is starting to become more clear each and every day. We continue to get new basketball product and the majority of it is now actually from the current season, rather than delayed releases from 2020-21.
Any sports fan knows there really is no off-season for your sport of choice and that couldn’t be more true with the NFL as there are free agent signings and trades seemingly each hour. The Russell Wilson trade to Denver was huge news this past week and even as I sit here writing this I got word of the fact that Davante Adams is now a Las Vegas Raider, which still hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Wait, Deshaun Watson just signed a record deal with…the Cleveland Browns.
It’s definitely an exciting time of year for football even though there are no games on the gridiron and collectors always seem interested in football. We had a few guys come in late this week to see what we had as far as Justin Herbert, A.J. Dillon, Jonathan Taylor and even Michael Gallup cards. We also saw a number of 2021 football products come in the store this week including Mosaic, Mosaic blasters, Playbook and the just released Limited. We don’t expect to have any trouble selling them.
Dealing with Distributors and Box Prices
It’s still an interesting interaction with different wholesalers and vendors as they continue to offer cards at prices that are higher than we can literally go buy them for on eBay at the same time. We were recently told by one vendor that we should just buy them and hold on to them which may have made sense during the pandemic as prices continued to rise by the day but now as they continue to soften, it makes absolutely no sense. Something has to give soon with the inflated prices of hobby boxes. People are paying $500 or more per box and getting $50 of value and it’s just hard to see that continuing. I’ve said that for quite some time now but people continue to pay way above SRP for boxes they open and are seemingly happy to continue to do so. What do I know? The gambling aspect is a strong appeal for some, I guess.
There are a number of soccer products that are selling well for us at the moment including Prizm and Mosaic. Donruss has been a solid offering, too. We’ve developed a few repeat customers that come in just for futbol cards. A few guys are in almost every day, which is great to see. Soccer has become a strong seller for many shops around the country.
It was a busy week for us which made it fly by even that much faster. Thanks for hearing me out. I’ll check back in again soon.
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