Toughest Job in Sports - Hobby Shop Owner

[sliqwill]

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-b...orts--baseball-card-shop-owner-143326636.html

just finished reading this and found it interesting...

I remember back in 89 or 90 my friend went to a grocery store and was going to buy 1 box of 1989 Upper Deck Baseball, which for those not around, were 3-5x the cost of Topps, Donruss, Fleer, or Score, but the box rang up at the price of a box of Topps, so they ended up getting 6 boxes and still had them unopened in like 93 when they moved...

eBay has also killed the hobby shop. instead of setting up shop where you have to pay employees, pay overhead for the building and power and such, you just pay 15% of your sale price to assorted fees...the recent promotions have only hurt the shop owners even more...no longer is there a 'location' premium, because the 'local' market drove the price. Prime example of this is 1990 or 1991 Upper Deck Gary Scott, who was the next coming of Christ to the Chicago Cubs, a cant miss prospect that booked for $2, but you couldn't touch for under $8 in the area, supply and demand...went to my cousins house 4 hours away and went to a shop down there and could buy them for $2 there and move them with ease where I lived, but the guy only had 2 down there...

now, you can buy anything, at almost any time on eBay. sure, there are still some folks who refuse to use it, but still. as a kid, there was a shop in my town of 1200, there were 2 shops in the town over of 5000, plus a full blown hobby shop where you could get model airplanes, various radio controlled things, kites, assorted wood for carving/building, and sports cards...now to get to a shop I have to travel 40 miles...

im sure that many of us in our 30's and 40's have seen the rise and fall of the sportscard industry...heck, I remember when it was a huge deal that a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle PSA 10 sold for $120,000 or something and people couldn't figure out why a mint card sold for so much over book at the time, of course, PSA was in its infancy at the time...

 

[Indiana Jones]

I remember those days. In the early 90s there were at least 7 shops and a slew of street dealers here in NYC. Today (20 years later), only one shop still stands and maybe one or two street dealers. It's not what it used to be. The internet came and took away the shops. It's like the chess clubs here as well. Back in the 70s and 80s there were at least 5 clubs/game houses to go to. Some were open late and you could play titled players in a game of skittles/king of the hill as each amateur would ry to unseat the strong player. Now, with internet chess, memberships declined as there was no need to leave the home.

In the article, what struck me was this:

"People would buy cases of brand new cards thinking they were going to send their kids to college with them and they would put them in the garage and wait," said John Broggi, executive director of the National Collectors Convention. "Well, everyone else was doing that too. When it came time to sell them, people became disillusioned very quickly. They were saving those cards and now they were worth less than what they originally paid for them."

That's not how the hobby works and I blame the card companies for that.

To meet the newfound demand, card manufacturers ramped up production in the mid-to-late 1980s, flooding the market with millions more cards than were produced in previous eras. Also adding to the glut of cards from the era was that collectors of all ages protected their cards like never before….

Therefore, EVERYTHING produced now is mint. Why would anyone expect less? But being protected from Day-1 with today's latest technology is totally different than preserving a card from decades ago without any special help. So please don't give me that card that is PSA graded MINT and selling 10x because that is what the Beckett multiplier says, because I can get a raw one for much much less. And if you crack a 2014 MINT card from its case and mix it up with the same cards that were pack-fresh, I bet no one would be able to tell the difference.

Oh sorry. I got off track….