It was yet another week full of shipping and receiving at the shop…and I’m not just talking sports cards.
Midweek, we received our semi-regular shipment of skids of bags, purses, and similar non-sports items. Our shop carries a line of backpacks, purses, wallets and other similar accessories that are in various licensed categories from Disney to Nickelodeon, Marvel, the Beatles and beyond. We got multiple skids of multiple bags of which we generally keep two of each and ship the rest to Amazon as a part of the FBA program. It’s actually a cornerstone of our day-to-day business. Selling just sports cards in a smaller city like ours–even with online opportunities–isn’t easy, so our shop owner has never been afraid to branch out a bit.
Did I mention there were a lot of boxes?
Of course, I completely understand the idea of broadening our horizons and working in categories that make us profit but at the same time our shop has a larger and ever growing selection of non-sports card and non-sports related items. That’s something that I honestly have to come to terms with on a regular basis. I am more than thankful that we continue to open the doors each and every day, that the shop is doing well and that I receive a biweekly paycheck, so we’ll do whatever we need to do but in my heart of hearts and collecting centric and sports fanatic mind, in a perfect world, I’d like to have more sports in the store.
Back to the actual job at hand… we got so many new backpacks that I took the better part of the day to unload the skids, organize, separate and repack for shipment back to the deepest recesses of the jungle that is known as Amazon.
On the sports card front, we snagged many of the new releases for the week including Clearly Donruss Football, which we featured in a recent Brief Box Break. We also brought in Revolution Basketball and UFC Optic blasters, among other products. Although I didn’t do a BBB, we did crack a box of Revolution basketball and our biggest hit was a Jerry Stackhouse autograph.
I was tempted to open a blaster box of the UFC product, as a few of my UFC fighter friends are collectors and because there are so incredibly cheap but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.
We’re seeing a reoccurring theme in our direct accounts with the card manufacturers. We were offered Mosaic Basketball blasters, current Topps Chrome Baseball blasters and a few other products direct but we also found them far cheaper on eBay. I’m fully aware of the game that needs to be played and the delicate balancing act where we still need to take some lesser or under performing products to be “awarded” the products that are higher end and those with a bigger margin but at the same time, we can’t completely shoot ourselves in the foot at store level just to hope to have the opportunity to buy some of the better products.
Now that French basketball sensation Victor Wembanyama is fully committed to entering the NBA draft in a few short weeks, and most likely being picked number one overall, many of the direct accounts are trying to play the angle of unloading their less successful product on us, and pressuring us to buy that in order to have the opportunity to buy Wembanyama featured products next year. The days of buying direct or having a wholesale account that meant you could actually have a nice margin on products is long gone. The straight shooting is long gone. Everything, and I mean everything, is a game now, as that margin has been drastically cut. We really have to watch the price points and margins each and every time.
Thanks to my colleagues filling in at the store, I was able to get to Clarion University’s Gold and Blue game, which is the football spring game for the season. My son will be a freshman on the roster next season, so it was great to see the team in pads for the first time. Although it was blustery cold and so much rain and wind was swirling that it was blowing sideways, we still had a great time and enjoyed the atmosphere tremendously.
I think anyone who works in a workplace over many hours, days, weeks, months and years with the same group of people very closely tend to have inside jokes and words or phrases that mean something to them and them alone. Over the past few weeks, I’ve realized that our co-worker Felix calls almost every male person that comes around the group “Johnny.” That goes for our close customers, friends, relatives and anyone else who has crossed our path. We, at the shop, have been more than generous in the use of this name recently. If you ever walk in the shop, just ask for Johnny.
Another new word or phrase that’s become part of the Sports Zone lexicon is “dog water”. One of our favorite customers who I’ve talked about at length and previous pieces, Nathan, is a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan. Well, the last time he was in our other great customer, Jeff was in who is a lifelong, diehard Dallas Cowboys fan. A little trash was talked back and forth and Nathan proceeded to call a few of the current Cowboys players “dog water,” which had us rolling. It’s now one of the most used phrases in the store vocabulary. Anything to keep the laughter going.
I hope your week was as eventful as mine.
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