Tony Reid offers his weekly dose of happenings inside Sports Zone, the Central Pennsylvania shop where he works.
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This week started off with the announcement from Topps regarding the MVP Buyback program. The store’s owner and I were on a Zoom call with various shops and Topps officials just a day prior to the announcement. We are one of the very few stores participating in the program in our area so, we were excited to see which cards were being accepted and how much trade value our customers would get from Topps.
I think on some level I was expecting a larger list of players and various cards, products and Topps brands but it was announced that new MVPs New York Yankees Aaron Judge and St. Louis Cardinals slugger Paul Goldschmidt were the two players spotlighted in the initial buyback. Collectors who have the Goldschmidt and Judge Topps Chrome cards can bring them into participating stores for credit they can use in that shop. It was a bit eyebrow raising when the dollar figures were released as base cards of the two stars would earn $20 in store credit while refractors would earn $40. Numbered cards between 150 and 399 would be worth $100 and the cards numbered between 25 and 99 are worth a whopping $200 in trade. We have been directed to send the cards customers bring to us off to COMC which will provide the reimbursement.
We had a few collectors bring in some base Chrome cards of both players on the first day but we haven’t seen a lot of them come through the door so far. We will see how it plays out in the upcoming days, weeks and months as the program runs in various forms through March 31st of 2023. Topps hasn’t let us know exactly what their plans are for all of the Judge and Goldschmidt cards that are being brought in and shipped off to the west coast so that will be another interesting component later on.
Thanksgiving Cards
Thanksgiving Day itself even offered the opportunity to look at some sports cards as the Reid crew went over to my brother and sister-in-law’s house a short drive away. My two nephews, Kaiden and Kolton are both card collectors. Kolton, who is 12, brought out binders of baseball, football and basketball cards for me to check out. He had some really nice stuff that he’s collected over a few year’s time, including rookies of Patrick Mahomes, TJ Watt, Ezekiel Elliott and other stars and some pretty cool serial numbered and parallel cards.
His older brother Kaiden, who is 15, also grabbed his binders and we went through his collection, organizing some of his nicer cards. It’s really cool to see kids that are passionate about sports, sports cards and the hobby in general. It made for a fun few hours after stuffing my face with turkey and mashed potatoes.
I went back to the shop pretty early Friday morning and made sure to pull aside some of the cards they wanted in preparation for the holidays.
Black Friday
As I mentioned last week we had produced a nice Black Friday flyer that went out to local shoppers so we were all set for business to be booming bright and early Friday morning. We had a number of people lined up at the door prior to opening and we were quite busy for about two and a half hours straight.
We went through of all of our free gift boxes in short order and sold a wide range of items from single cards to boxes to action figures and a lot of other items.
Our Saturday was a bit more laid back but we’re always flowing with online orders in the back of the house so in addition to the in-store traffic, we walked into nearly 300 mail orders from all over the country after Thanksgiving.
It’s been keeping us busy as usual.
Wish me luck as we head into the meat of the holiday shopping season.
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