1578 - Rich Klein, LCS or DCS?

Foreign. Welcome Dr. James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Thanks Sponsors Beckett Media, Beckett grading, Beckett authentication comc.com Burbank sports cards Mike Stadium Sports Cards, Heritage Auctions, Huggers and Scott Auctions, Topps Upper Deck and Panini Episode with Rich Klein, my frequent co host, had a podcast session over Zoom and split it into several parts. So you'll be getting Rich Klein week this week. So thanks Rich and thanks listeners and here it is. First of all, Rich, good to see you. I saw you last weekend but I didn't see at the national. What's your feeling now? Because you've missed a couple Nationals. You had such a great run there, but you're missed when you're not there, certainly. And I think you keep track on YouTube or other places to figure out what's going on. But how are you feeling about that now? The famous Yogi line. Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. It was too crowded. And honestly, we're blessed. I have the Dallas Card Show 12 minutes from where I live. It's not the national, but for what I do nowadays, it's perfectly sufficient. At the Dallas Card show, you and I, we have our lanes and we can finish our lane in the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes not even needing all four days to complete our lane. And I can see everything I want to see and a lot of times I don't even go back on Sunday. And you're similar. I think at the national you can start at the beginning and go to the end and in your lane. In my lane you cannot finish. Honestly, at the last Dallas Card Show I finished my lane by Friday at 1pm but we are both very blessed. Kyle and his team do let us get in a little bit earlier, which was a game changer too. I mentioned there's VIP passes or tickets, there's media passes, there's corporate, and each one of those has some different conditions. You'd think VIP be the best or media would be the best, but I think corporate is the best because then we're able to get in with the corporates. Yes, at the national, corporates definitely the best. Yu-Gi-Oh but I'm saying Kyle is treating us as corporates. Earlier when dealers are still setting up. I've read some of the message boards. I listen to some content creators that I know are reasonably straight shooters worth me listening to because they tend to be reasonably short and give me information up my alleys. There's a lot of different ways to parse the information. For example, at a card show there are different eras, sports and non sports and all these ways you could parse it out in the content creation world. Same thing. You've got some people that really focus on vintage, people that focus on modern, focus on whales and goats, focus on Pokemon. So just tell me what it is so that I can go to the shows and the content creators that have the stuff I'm interested in. Some of the content creators are more general, but I like it when at least by the episode they're telling you this is about football cards or this is about one piece. And I don't listen to everyone every week or every time there's a few I listen to. And I'll happily say I listen to Neo. I listen to Sports Car Dad. He usually keeps his under 10 minutes, which is wonderful. I listen to Junk Wax hero Mike out of Maine. I listen to Jeff Wilson, who sometimes a little bit of hype. But understand Jeff is running a huge store. Plus I keep my feet on the ground, so to speak. I still go to the local shows, the local stores. And because of the newsletter I do, I am in pretty good contact with a lot of people. That smaller show you told me about that, I went out and we did some boxes together and roamed around some. It was not as much overlap with Kyle's shows, even though it's 20 minutes away, not that far. Slightly different part of the Metroplex, but a lot more Pokemon. A lot of dealers I wasn't that familiar with. And yet I bought from a couple that I see regularly, either at your show or at Kyle's show. You introduced me to a new dealer, which was fun. He was a really good guy. I liked him. NTX is such a different world than the Dallas Car show, a big, more traditional show where NTX is almost a big, more modern show. It's got an interesting mix. The music is playing because of the building for NTX, which is the old JCPenney building. It's now what is called the Music City Mall. There are some really interesting turns you can get lost in there. But Kyle's show, you can usually pretty much do straight lines and you'll get to everything. At this show, you can actually get a little disoriented. It's not like you're going to lose where you are. You just don't always remember where you are. I know my friend John and Raymond and the other John we bought stuff from. I know where they are every show so I can go find them, the other people. It's catch as catch can and I just get lucky. Sometimes I liked who you found. Sometimes I Find the value box dealers before you do. And sometimes you find the value box dealers before I do. They had a comic book on one section area. They had a lot of Pokemon and TCG stuff. But then there was a core group of collectors. I'm not one to complain about extra tables there. Like you said. I think his intention was probably to have more sports car dealers. Dan and I have traded emails and he had a hundred extra tables a couple shows ago. And as a business person, he could sell 100 Pokemon tables. Why not sell when you have the space? But you know, you talk about Velocity of sales. How long would it take somebody to get a hundred sports car dealers to come? A lot longer than to put out the word that I've got 100 tables and the Pokemon and TCG people. I don't know, it was the same day, but all of a sudden that room was pretty full. And it just meant I was going to walk pretty quickly through those areas but acknowledge the energy and some high prices. And I just, I gotta draw the line somewhere. I have a lot of knowledge about sports cards. Enough is enough. I've gotta leave the TCG world for other people. You and me both, both of us do not get into the TCG world. The card show technology, like auction wire and mascot. The technology for knowing in advance when you go to a card show what tables are going to have, what kind of stuff they're focusing on. This individual card. I just would like to know the categories. And the same thing that'd be true of card shops. You sent me something about the whole idea of having a card shop in 2026. Very different from 1980 when Gerbis and one-of-one and I were doing it. But I'd like to know, if I were to be going to a local card shop, I'd want to know, do they have any vintage? Is it all wax? Do they have bargain boxes? Do they have TCGs? And I'd like to know rough percentages. Is that too much to ask? Or even if it is, is there enough of a business idea there that when you're having a show calendar, you would know the percentages? And if you had a card shop directory, you have the percentages. So you wouldn't be disappointed to be truth in packaging in the last empire of stores. Their new Denton store is really where they're focusing more on vintage than any of their other stores. And they do a reasonably good job of publicizing. If you want vintage, go to the Denton store. There are bits and pieces of vintage at the other stores, but Denton is really where they are focusing a lot of the vintage stuff at. And you know that from following them on social media. Most of the old school card store that you were part owner of way back in the day and that I managed and even the original triple cards when Al owned it and he had the Wall of Commons and it was set up a lot like what Rob Veras would do. Those stores really don't exist anymore locally in DFW and I'm okay with that because they're making a business decision that what they're doing keeps them going and you have to make a business decision. When I sit with my friend Ryan from RJ Dukes and he buys or trades for cards at every single show he does, he sits there and makes competitive offers. When people bring him cards, he's going to be opening a second store. So he knows that he's got to be ramping up the singles for the store. Everybody does something different and that's okay. But the existential threat that is postulated for local card shops is if they don't have direct allocation, they can't be in business. I don't think that's true. I think it's a negative if you don't have direct allocations where you have to go on the secondary market. But it's not a deal breaker unless Your business is 80% based on new wax. That's why I always said there is a market in the DFW area for a singles based store with some unopened included. That's what first base was. 80, 20 being open stuff that you could already open, that you could pick what you want. And 20% was the new wax. Everything was cheaper in those days but those percentages were probably pretty. I think there's a market for that. But you have to understand the best store after First Base left was the old Nick's when Nick and Debbie still owned was wax and they did well with wax. This is pre Fanatics, pre pandemic. But they always had a lot of new wax. But they had wonderful singles and they had it set up where anything $3 and less than the Beckett OPG was 50 cents a piece of. They keep vintage cards behind and they had showcase cards. So they truly were a singles outlet. They had cards. My team and the best players were separated and I think that type of story would work again. Okay, we throw around the acronym lcs a local card shop. As if all card shops are local. All of them have a location. But what you're talking about with Nick's and Maybe first base from back in the day. And certain shops now, certainly Cards hq, Burbank Card Vault by Tom Brady those are not local card shops as much as they are destination card shops. Local card shops to me means you go to your neighborhood, you would expect full service, all the wax and all that stuff. But if you're a destination card shop, you're going to have some specialty on. Some of the ones I mentioned are going to have high end wax, all the latest and greatest wax, or in Burbank's case, such a huge array of better cards and singles. And you mentioned vintage up in Denton. There's a destination you're going to drive to that because it's not the typical lcs, it's a destination card shop. And there's also the digital aspects of the card shop, which there's still card shops that don't have any real digital presence. I think not many of them anymore. Not that they're necessarily doing breaking, but they just have a social media presence. They're not necessarily doing Whatnot or ebay live, but they're aware of those things and they're taking advantage of them as they occur. But the destination card shop has something that's worth driving for, which means it's not the same mix that everybody has. There's something special about it and that could be heavy tcg, heavy vintage, heavy singles, heavy expensive wax. What is worth getting in your car and driving for? I will point out, and I still call it my lcx. The waxed or triple card, which is down the street from My House, is five minutes away and they all know me there. And if they don't know me, the manager introduces them to me and says he's been coming here since forever. That store is one of the key stores in the area for the TCG world. They have Thursday night one piece and I believe Saturday, another TCG event. Usually at that store it works very well. Not every store has those events. They have so many stores, but yet each one ends up with an individual Fleer because the manager's different, the mix of customers are different, how things are done are different. It depends on the space. The triple cards buy My House in Plano, by the nature of how that store is set out, is totally different than the Waxed in Rowlett where I went on the Saturday the Dallas card show instead of going back to the show because they had a donation for me. And those stores are set up totally differently. That Rowlett store, you can have five or six tables in the middle of the Fleer The triple the waxed and Plano, you can have only a couple tables in the middle of the Fleer Because the stores are set up differently because of the nature of the build, they're not using the same cookie cutter type building for every single store. That's another example of where Lawrence is probably using his business acumen to experiment and try to figure out what works in what location based on the shape of the building and the demographics around there. But my point is just what is a card shop? Make your card shop worth going to digitally as well as the destination of getting in your car and maybe driving an hour so you can touch the cards and have an experience that's not typical for your typical lcs that perhaps has a little bit everything. I don't know if you have an LCS anymore, whether you can anymore have a little bit of everything. When one-of-one and you and Gervis were all involved, you could have a little bit of everything. In the 80s and early 90s, I don't know if 2026, you can have a little bit of everything in the store anymore. I think you have to. If you don't have direct allocations, you've got to be smart. You've got to have some other things that catch somebody's Yu-Gi-Oh And not only that, people are buying a lot of the current hot products online one-of-one So you don't have to go into a card shop. You could go to the show or, or order it from one of these other platforms. A couple of things. I know people get down on Fanatics for various reasons, but if you have an account with Fanatics, one thing they've good at in recent years is blaster boxes and the mega boxes and the things in the Walmarts and the targets, they were also given to the card stores. So you can a lot of times get very affordable boxes in the card store. It's no longer a guaranteed $100 to buy a box. It can be 20, 25, $30 and you walk out. It's a blaster box, but it'd be what you would have gotten at one of the big box stores one-of-one But Fanatics have done some really good things for the sports collecting hobby in recent years that has really made it accessible to even more people than before. You can't grow the hobby exponentially with doing the same thing you've always done. So like I said, Lawrence, Fanatics and many others are experimenting. And when that experiment works, you do more of that. And if it doesn't work, you say that didn't work. I'm glad we're in a hobby that's growing dynamically. And it's growing dynamically. But you saw all the hype, the Mavericks with the Cooper Flag Debut patch card. It got pulled, apparently in a mom and pop store in Rhode Island. That, to me, is the best sign. Fanatics did not play games with where that card was. Because if they really were playing games, you know where that card would have been found. I'm not a conspiracy theorist.