Collect What You Enjoy, Enjoy What You Collect

By now, you’ve noticed that buying is at an all-time low. The cards that do sell, sell at a low percentage of what they normally go for. When you put these two factors together, you would likely ask why buying levels are not increasing. The obvious choice would be that the economy is bad. I think it goes deeper than that because even trading is down. Other than shipping costs, what does trading have to do with the economy? A lot of people appear to be annoyed by trade offers or the lack of trading. Also Upper Deck has cut jobs in multiple rounds, with the first happening in the summer of 2010.  I also read how dealers are buying less because of the lack of sales and they already have inventory built up.

I stopped buying packs and wax due to the fact that unwanted cards were nearly impossible to get rid of. Most people want what’s hot, but many have lower budgets than they are used to. With the decline in the economy, the price of wax doesn’t justify what they have in the product. Something has to give. I wonder who will follow Fleer’s lead.

Another thing that is very annoying are group breaks? Whenever you see box break posts of a product that you need something out of, you think, “Maybe they pulled something I need for my collection.” But when you click the thread, you see, “Get your spot now”. If you don’t know what this is, let me explain. A person buys a box or more of a certain product and charge a certain price per spot. Each spot gives you a random team. If you pay for 3 spots, you get 3 teams at random. Whenever the person open his box, you get all base, inserts, autographs, etc. of that team. This is great for “random” collectors, but it has been flooding message boards to the point where I never look at box break threads anymore. You never know if it is an actual box break or “group” break. If you do want to get in on a group break I recommend going for one at TCS.

I guess a lot of things in today’s hobby have annoyed me more than things in the past, such as those eBay 1/1s. It seems people are just confused and don’t know what to do now in this time of economic crisis. When selling, people sometimes are asking for 5% to 10% OVER BV and expect you to cover shipping costs as well.  With the price increases for fees at eBay, you have less of a variety to choose from. And Checkoutmycards has 4 TIMES higher rates then ebay, making them downright criminal.  Really the best option is still ebay but that doesn’t mean you have to be happy with them. Just the lesser of the evils I suppose.

All of these small annoyances, along with many others, make collecting a headache if you get too wrapped up in them.  So step back for a minute and take a minute to simply collect what you enjoy and enjoy what you collect!