Off-Topic Forum

I think you can pare it down to this one moment in time:

WHEN THEY REMOVED THE GUM FROM THE PACKS.

It became a business when the retail price of a pack outpaced the allowance of the youth. As soon as the products were marketed primarily to adults, everything changed. If you want to place blame anywhere, look no further than your own mirror. If you've purchased "premium products" then you've perpetuated the problem. If you buy cards like lottery tickets, chasing some possibly enclosed item purely for it's value then you're part of the problem. Check my tag line. It's what I truly believe. Value what you collect, don't collect for value. Have you ever seen someone at a store bust a box, pull all the "value cards" and leave the rest on the counter? That's the problem. Honest self-evaluation time. Have you ever bought a pack of cards and been upset, frustrated or disappointed with the contents of that pack? If you answered yes, then you paid too much for those cards and you're looking for profit not enjoyment. 

"Value what you collect, don't collect for value."

I like this line of philosophy a great deal.  I always get a smile when I open a pack and get a player I like.  Although sometimes I do get disappointed when I buy a handful of packs and don't get any Penguins or Pirates or Arsenal players.

I suppose I should have said seriously or truly disappointed.

"Have you ever bought a pack of cards and been upset, frustrated or disappointed with the contents of that pack? If you answered yes, then you paid too much for those cards and you're looking for profit not enjoyment."

Not quite. It's very frustrating to open a pack and have it be all duplicates...in the exact same order of a pack you've already opened. A very common problem with Panini, especially. I just did a case...something I've been dreaming about my whole life, pretty much- and the entire final box was 100% duplicates...I ended up with more than 200 duplicates, to a 150 card set, but still didn't get 5 cards in the entire case. You're darn right I'm annoyed about that.

i really do like some of the quotes that were mentioned so far.. on another note- how does feel about the distribution of the base cards today? would you say its somewhat comparable to the 80's/90's distribution?  where its just easy to build a base set? 

i look at buying the bowman hobby jumbo boxes- you can build a complete set from that, almost a complete set of the prospects too. i bought 2 jumbo boxes and have almost everything.  no fun in that compared to cracking 5 or so packs.

As previously mentioned by a few: To the card makers it has always been a business, way back when (1888something or a little earlier) the first Tobacco company stuffed a cardboard picture of a baseball player, or a flower, or cute little bunny rabbit, into a pack of tobacco (I don't recall when "cigarettes" hit the market) the business of trading cards began. It would take a few years before "collectors" would emerge to make it a "hobby". As collectors we sort of think in reverse our hobby didn't become a business the cardboard card business became the trading card Hobby.

As to the modern interpretation of the Hobby becoming a business I would say it was the early 1980s card Boom when the Baby Boomers and slightly younger than boomers were in their 20s and 30s started "investing" in the current trading cards that were on the market. The thinking being "hey those Mantle and Mays cards from the 1950s and '60s from my childhood are worth at least $100s even in pretty awful condition. If I buy about a dozen or more of these cards of Nolan Ryan, Carlton Fisk and this Jose Consako (sic) guy in about 20 to 30 years I can sell them for $1,000s" Well as we all know the card companies started catching on and then there were way too many card companies making way too many cards for way too many collectors aka "investors" 

Now we have the same sort of problem, except there are fewer card companies but they are cranking out way too many card sets, and variations of each card and making 1,000s of cards each year for just one lousy player.

I remember as a kid in the 70s having more than 5 cards of any one player was an achievement. IN the early 80s when I had reorganized my Baseball into alphabetical order by player name the most I had of any one player was somewhere between a dozen to 15 or 16 that was Johnny Bench and one or two other guys. Most of my PC players I had somewhere between 5-10 cards of. Now sheesh I must have at least 50-100 of each player and those are the guys I don't PC.

It has been and always will be a hobby for me. (early 80s)   Me and my Nebraska Cornhuskers collection...    

That said I'm finally seeing the real side of the business.  I'm trying to sell my nephew's collection (200,000 cards)   I set up at a show for the 1st time ever.    Sold less then a 100.00 to collectors and 700.00 to other sellers.   Most of the sellers purchased more cards then they sold at the show.  All of them use E-bay and most use COMC, only one has a store front.  

1992. Recall getting back in around 1990 and hating how the gum/wax style wrapper ruined at least 2 cards in the pack. This also caused a shift by candy dealers not being able to use that gum aspect to push the cards like before. 

UD issuing the Jordan SP1 as an insert in their '91 baseball also changed things.

The folks I know who see the stuff I have make comments such as: "How much can you get for those?", "You're gonna be rich one day!", or my favorite one that was recently said to me "Why do you have all that $***? You can't take it with you."

I stayed out of this early Friday when I saw it b/c I knew I'd have much more to comment on after more posts got added. I was right. But at the same time, some of those comments have been made. So I don't need to say as much now. Here's what I will say...

1. In the eyes of companies making cards, I'd agree that it started with Topps buying Bowman. It got more complicated in 1980 when Fleer and Donruss sued for the rights to also make MLB cards. Then it shifted even more into a business when Score, Upper Deck, Pro Set, Skybox and Action Packed jumped in at about the same time in the late-80's/early-90's. Notice that I left out Sportflics, K-Mart, Woolworth's, etc. Those were novelty cards at the time. McDonald's cards replaced most of those in the following years, along with a few others.

2. I got into collecting in the mid-80's. Everything was abundant, but I only wanted one thing... STL Cardinals cards that I didn't have. Then in the late-80's, all sports were pretty abundant. It wasn't just MLB anymore. Keep in mind that I am in (and always have been in) North Carolina. There has never been an MLB team here, but that has always been the most-available trading cards in sports here. Even as NASCAR was just getting into mass-produced cards, they became harder to get than even hockey and soccer cards here after about 1991. So, after starting with MLB cards, then starting to add football and NASCAR cards, it got harder to get anything that really interested me outside of MLB. The NBA cards became easily available around 1990-91 b/c we finally had a team here with the Charlotte Hornets (the original team, not the New Orleans team or the current new team) and the NBA cards were selling in stores. The cards I bought back then were b/c I wanted to collect them. But I only wanted to collect certain teams/players in certain sports. I was truly collecting cards then. But I was also thinking about who I could trade these other cards to that I don't want. For baseball, it was pretty easy then b/c almost everyone I knew was either a Braves or Orioles fan. All the other sports were much more complicated. Everyone collecting NBA wanted Hornets cards here. That didn't work well. NFL was a mess trying to trade b/c everyone collected just the big teams or close teams (ATL/WAS, SF/DAL/NY). Today, I can trade all over the place to get what I want to collect while also sending cards someone else wants to collect.

#3. I have to ditto Billy's reply to Lerxst2112's post. I have been disappointed with packs that I bought many times in the past, but it had nothing to do with profit and everything to do with enjoyment! I bought a ton (not literally, but for a teenager...) of 1992 Upper Deck MLB packs trying to complete the full set. I was getting SO VERY TIRED of pulling the exact same cards in every pack! I never finished that set b/c the Hi-Card packs were so loaded with low-number cards that it just ticked me off! I even pulled one pack that had every single card with a blank back. I sent them back to Upper Deck and they mailed me 3 fresh packs of cards to replace them. Of course, I only pulled two cards from those 3 packs that I needed for the set. That ended my interest in trying to complete sets of any kind for almost any reason! In hindsight, I should've kept the blank-backs. Pack collation was a big problem then and it's started to resurface again for the past several years now. That's REALLY bad when you consider how many inserts and parallels are put into each pack now. If the cards don't vary from one pack to the next (sometimes even in the same box), what's the point of buying more than one?

My final note: I don't buy boxes of cards to sell the stuff I pull. I buy boxes to collect the stuff I want and trade the rest for more cards that I didn't pull. I hope others continue to buy boxes to trade me the cards they pulled but don't want for the cards I pulled that I don't want but that they do want. I like to keep the circle going. Thanks to the internet, we can all keep that going!