1562 - Ramblings 8.0

Foreign. Welcome Dr. James Beckett Sports Card Insights Another ramblings episode. Catching up on some mail and things that have crossed my desk. Interesting comments and questions and musings. First of all, thanks sponsors Topps Panini, Upper Deck Heritage Auctions, Hugs and Scott Auctions Mike Stadium Sports Cards, Burbank sports cards, compse.com and Beckett Media Beckett Grading Beckett Authentication First, I have already talked a little bit about this Facebook Marketplace lead that was passed on to me by my wife, which I'd already decided not to go check it out because as I said, I looked at the pictures and I deduced that it was very unlikely to be a good buy. It was a Buy it now price. 21,000 cards for $500 in monster boxes. Not a lot of pictures, mainly just showing the cards there. And I've talked about that. You could tell by the color. You kind of they're late 80s cards by just seeing the way they're laying there. So I told my lovely wife that and she said, well, it's only five minutes away, maybe it'll be a good deal. And I thought, you really want me to buy more cards? If it's a great deal, then this would be terrific. But I don't think it's going to be. And as I said, I had already decided not to go. And then she contacted me after whatever I put into the podcast and she said, oh, I got a bounce back from the guy that said that he thought he had it sold, but then this guy didn't show and so it's still available and he can meet you over there in the parking lot of the cvs, which is five minutes away. Why don't you go check it out? I said, oh, okay, I'll do that. So I went over there and I looked through it and his name was Alex. I said, I'm Jim Alex. I like to look at the cards. They were in the back of his Tahoe. So he opened it up and it was hot and I don't know what he was thinking, but it took me about 10 minutes to go through the 20,000 cards because I do it in milliseconds because I have all this dollar box experience. So I treated it as if I was going to pay 500 bucks or anything how dollar box or better cards are in these boxes so I can go very quickly. It was a run of 87 tops. I wasn't going to slow down to see if there's a McGuire in there, and I wouldn't buy that for a dollar if it was in a quarter box, I might pick it up. So I went through it in about 10 minutes. And I think he was in shock. I think he was hopeful that, wow, if he went through it this fast, he must be really sold. It was the opposite. I really could see that as I was going super fast, there were less than 50 cards that I would have pulled out of a quarter box and I would have gotten those for 20 cents. That's 10 bucks. So I said, I'm sorry, it's not for me. So what would you pay? You know, it's 500 bucks, but I'm negotiable. I said, no, I can't even give you a price. I just give you some advice, take some more pictures. Because he really and maybe knowingly, he didn't take very good pictures. And I said, and lower your price. And so maybe it sold. And my very empathic wife, who's sensitive to the feelings of others, said, you really helped him. I hope I did. But she said, it was five minutes of your time, but you probably helped him to be able to sell it to somebody else and get the cards back into circulation. So I thought that's a very nice attitude. Again, nothing in there. It was extremely unlikely to find anything to be gradable. And so again, just not lesson learned, but just an experience. I did feel safe. I had my five 100 bills in my wallet just in case. But I will take them to the card show. That's this weekend. Second rambling. There's been a lot of comments about psa. Literally all the grading companies occasionally make mistakes, and when they do make a mistake, it's trumpeted. It's really not the sky is falling. But it's considered either negligence, incompetence, maybe even foul play, depending on the direction of the mistake. But it can't be just a mistake. And every company makes mistakes, every person make mistakes, individual creators make mistakes. And the process can sometimes break down as it is when sometimes a label is misplaced. Now, my experience with bgs, which absolutely, I'll go to war for the guys there, and many of them were hired in my regime and I just think they're terrific, they're hardworking, they're excellent. But. And it's less than one in a thousand. But I have gotten mistakes of my cards that I've put in there and gotten back over time. And when I go through them, I realize, oh, these two labels were switched. Could have even a different player could be the same guy. I've graded a lot of cards. There's. And it's less than one in a thousand. The problem is with psa, if they're making one out of a thousand labeling mistakes, that's a big number when they're grading a couple million cards a month. So again, every company makes mistakes. What happened that made me think about this is that I got a mistake in my favor from Amazon. I ordered a set of air tags because I was thinking, I'm going the national that's coming up. I'm going to add some additional air tags to anything that I want to make sure. I'm going to have a carry on. I've got a backpack and then I've got a duffel that I fold up just in case I need to bring more stuff. And then I've got other kinds of things. I may stick one in my wallet for that matter. Anyway, so I got a set of air tags and they sent me additional air tags. And so I thought, how dare they? I didn't think that. So you contact them and they said, there's really no provision for sending it back unless you want your money back. I said, I really don't want my money back, but I got an extra good deal. And they said, it's just apparently more hassle to send them back than it is to just say, just keep them with our compliments. So again, no foul play, no financial benefit to Amazon other than the mistake was to my benefit and it made made me a happy customer. I've been a long time Amazon prime guy. So again, they made a mistake, but they weren't flustered by the mistake. It was like, mistakes happen and this is the way we deal with mistakes. Psa, same thing. They're going to make a mistake occasionally. BGS going to make a mistake occasionally. You want to learn some mistakes, you want to eliminate mistakes, reduce your mistakes. And I believe in the Amazon case, they should have had some kind of an AI provision where as the package is being weighed, it should have said it weighs twice as much as it should, even though they don't weigh very much. They could calibrate that to say, you know what the there's two of them in here instead of one. So it's overweight. Let's bounce that out and give it a look. Same thing with psa. If there's a labeling mistake that can be done by AI and the mistakes that BGS has made on cards that I put in the player name does not match the player on the card. So it got an obviously different thing. And that could be just a quick scan. If there's a conveyor belt and just scanning what's going on. Again, it's after there's a stack of labels and there's a stack of cards, there's a stack of inner sleeves, there's a stack of the front and back of the slab. All that stuff is a set assembled and if something gets out of order, but there ought to be a catch at the end. Again, less than one in a thousand, but that can still be a big number. Also, when I listen to these other podcasts, there was a lot of back and forth about dynamic pricing, which I actually brought up before that I had brought up the idea of dynamic pricing for grading when PSA was taking a break from low cost submissions, the lower tiers. And that's frustrating, but that's a business decision they made. And that part of fixing grading might involve some kind of dynamic pricing. And that dynamic pricing is usually thought to be like surge pricing. They're going to charge more when they're busy and less when they're not. But there's also something called surveillance pricing. If you think you don't like dynamic pricing, you probably really don't like surveillance or predictive pricing. And that is that PSA or any company in the industry, or any company, Uber for that matter, they somehow know based on your past customer behavior, how much you perhaps will be willing to pay. And that is a scary thought. It's surveillance. But there's enough known about you through the various actions that you take that are monitored, are known from your digital and real life activity to know that you would be willing to pay more or you'd be willing to pay less and send some extra ones. Again, scary thought, but that's business. There's nothing illegal about it unless they're invading your privacy. But many times we've given over privacy. I saw an article from one of these management things that said that acting stupid can sometimes be helpful whether you're the boss. And you say, I don't really understand that and explain that to me. I'm just wondering, is that. And so you're not acting stupid as much as you're being open, you're being curious. You're saying, I'm not sure I have all the answers here. Enlighten me. Versus a know it all say hey, here's the deal. And so I'm just wondering. Last episode was about buying big cards. I just wondered if you go up to a a booth with a know it all attitude where you get less discount than if you come up and say, hey, help me understand this how's this card worth more or less? Give me a lesson. I'm not really sure there. Or maybe they would try to take advantage of you. It could work both ways. So I'm not saying be stupid and I don't think this article is saying that either. It's just that having not a stupid mindset, but thinking that, not going in there with having all the answers and saying just help me, walk me through this, how this should work. So that's a good thought there. Another thing I've been hearing about is buying decisions. Like I said, the last episode was about buying a big card at a card show. Part of the buying decision is where you're going to buy, how you're going to pay. But what are you going to buy? My first thought is always to buy something seen versus something unseen. With the scene, I can calculate this is the card, I'm going to pay this much for it. Good deal now or not, but I can make that decision. Whereas something that's unseen, like a pack or repack, anything that's a blind box, then you might do better, you might do worse. And that's exciting. But my lane is to buy cards that I've seen. I want this one, not that one. I occasionally experience how the other half lives, basically. Actually, it's more than the other half. Like most people really enjoy buying something and just Christmas morning you open up a present, you take off the rack and you're not sure you what you're going to get. Okay, so if you did do a blind box, you did something unseen, you're either going to buy something that's originally packed or something that's secondarily repacked. And the repacks have come on very strong lately because frankly, you probably have a higher expected value in the way those are configured by reputable secondary repackers. But you probably have a lower ceiling than original packs that are packed by tops or panini or upper deck or leaf. It's dangerous because I think in the secondary repacks, brand really does matter. Of course, in the original pack you can see it's tops or it's panini or it's upper deck. But the secondary repack, the best ones, let you know what the potential is in there and they stand by it. And it's perhaps auditable in some way. And from the reputable brand, you're not expecting that these have been X rayed or weighed or felt or anything like that. There's some kind of a way that truly is a blind box. So I think branding really matters with those kind of things. And then I thought does branding matter with the original packs and fanatics has announced they're going to be taking off the outer wrapping, the cello wrap of boxes for stores and situations where they want to make sure that it's not being resold. So it's taking off that outer seal. I'm hoping that the brand in the breaking doesn't matter, although if there's somebody disreputable, I wouldn't break with them. But usually the choice between breakers is based on their personality and their service and some of these extras. But the cards are the cards. Hopefully if one breaker is getting better cards than another consistently, that's a problem. And I don't think anybody's in favor of that other than if a breaker is. But they want to brag that they do get better stuff. So again, I think that's something that promotes business. That's part of their shtick. Then I got a nice email from. I'll just say Tim, who was talking about the education. An educator himself. He had a nice comment there that I want to thank you, Tim, for saying. He says thank you for taking the time to preserve a historical record while also keeping an active eye on the hobbies present. And that is exactly what I'm trying to do. So very well said. You obviously are an educator and well spoken. So thank you. He's developed some courses for junior high and high school students for helping with soft skills and life skills, and he's using basketball card and basketball content to do it. I don't know. It could be boys and girls. There's a lot of girls interested in basketball too. So basketball is a very participatory sport. It's got a great following. He says the students just love it and they could trade their cards. There's life lessons in the way they handle that. And then lastly, he appreciated as an educator that my parents, my dad, I think, always liked education. I think he was pleased that I went to extra school and got extra degrees. But anyway, at the age of 80, my mom and dad, they're both 80 at the time they started this school in South Dallas in one of the poor sections of town with students of color who had mainly dropped out of school. And this was to try to prepare them for life and get them not college ready, but life ready. And a couple of them went to community college and things like that. But some them had some dyslexia or different things like that, but they really showed up for them. So all throughout their 80s they were going down there and it was a 45 minute commute every way. So for sure, respect for my mom and dad and I went down there some, but they were down there a lot. Then when they were in their 90s, which again, this was this century because they became emeritus and emeritus, I guess it comes from Latin, but emerit is in the middle of it and emerit e merit is like coming from or out of the merit. You're out, but you earned it, you respected it, and you're retired. So emeritus is a retired respected person who's paid their dues, which my parents certainly were. The school is still going strong. Actually, the woman my parents hired pretty early on, not the very first headmaster, but the executive director just really has done a terrific job, worked very closely with my parents. Even when my parents stepped back in their 90s and they still provided some funding. But the new executive director took care of a lot of that and really cared about the students and did an ongoing terrific job. So, yes, they just had their 21st anniversary class. It's not huge, but they have some growth potential because they're building their brand. It's Cornerstone Crossroads Academy. You can look it up. My parents, they're both gone now, but they have an ongoing legacy and my in laws are celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary as well next month. So very excited about that. My parents made it 75 years and Diane's parents are one more month to go. They're hanging in there, really worthy of honor as well. Hopefully that bodes well for Diane and me and our kids that we're going to have a good long life that's fruitful to the end, hopefully. So thanks, Tim, and thanks others for your contributions to a podcast that I'm really enjoying. I like the ramblings because I can say what I want to say, but I've got some good guests coming up. I've got some other national programming type content that I hope you'll like as well. Till next time, keep hobbying the way you hobby. I'm in my lane. If your lane overlaps with mine, so much the better.