General Forum

Hello,

If you have a moment please share your experience.

Do you remember where you had your 1st experience/exposure to trading cards?

Was there 1 store in particular or several places where you acquired them from?

I got started in around 1974-75 there was a non-franchise candy/convenience store 

that carried lots of candy and some cards just 1 block up Champagneur street in a district known as Park Extension in Montreal.

This was the original fuel to the fire and never stopped since.

Almost daily i would scrounge up a dollar and get 8 to 10 packs of cards and get a few of those 1c swedish berries and 5c gumball packs or bottle caps or Popeye smokes and the occasional candy hearts with messages on them. Thrills soapy gum(who thought of that?) etc...

Thank you for sharing your stories,

Steven

Since my father was a collector I remember 1986 Donruss and 1982 transformers don't remember much about it as I was really young

My first pack of cards was a pack of 4th Series Garbage Pail Kids. I bought it from the ice cream truck driver. I was in third grade and some of my school chums showed me these cool, gross little pictures of art and I had to have some. The first card I saw from my first pack was Dribblin Derek. A pack cost a quarter.  

All of a sudden I am feeling old...

Mid-70s. Where I went to school in a rural town of less than 100 residents there was one store called The Co-Op. Friends used to go there during recess and buy packs of cards, mostly hockey. I remember trading to get the whole set put together the one year. Cards were affordable and you got a stick of some excellent gum to chew on for about a minute.

Can read a bunch from some of the members who have been here a while (if they don't feel like typing it all out again, which includes me in there) here:
https://www.tcdb.com/Forum.cfm/Page/G/ID/0/?MODE=VIEW&ThreadID=67#1543

I can remember standing out front of our local Loblaws with a friend and asking people as they came out of the store for their NHL Action Players strips as they left with their groceries, but that's not "buying" more like begging. I guess my first purchase would have been from Art's Variety on Eagle Street in Newmarket, Ontario after returning some empty coke bottles when I was 7-8 years old 1974 O-Pee-Chee baseball cards.  

It was 1970 and I was 8. A mile from my house was a little convenience store located on NY Route 94, right on the edge of our development. The store was called Barton's but the kids in the neighborhood called it Bunk's. That summer, after finishing my chores (my Dad left a healthy list of things for me to do every day), I made my way to Bunk's in the hot sun and with my chore allowance, and buy one cold drink and as many packs of Topps baseball cards that I could with the remaining cash I had. Packs were 10c each. I bought so many that I nearly had a complete set by Labor Day. It got to the point where I knew whether or not I had obtained a new card for the set of just another pack of duplicates. That routine continued through the 1976 set.

At Joe's Variety Store in Watertown, MA in 1965. 5 cents a pack for Topps.

Family trip to Toronto, Canada.  Got a pack of 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee hockey. That pack had 4 Hall of Famers - Ed Giacomin, Jacques Plante, Guy LeFleur and Gordie Howe.

I still have them. Still One of my favorite sets. 

They don't pack them like that any more !

The corner store down the street back in the early 60's. It was probably 5 cents a pack