As an older Collector, I try not to slip into Grandpa Simpson mode shouting at clouds when it comes to the Hobby and that is sometimes a heavy lift. The Hobby press often reads like a lame financial journal filled with fraud and shiny shit (not that there is anything wrong with collecting that) seems to be the flavor of the day for Hobby Playas, and card history and lore seems to fall back before a flood of ignorance and hype designed to assimilate us all into a shiny refractor groupthink.
The reason is simple: the base of new issues flooding the Hobby expands every week with each new release and someone has to be convinced to buy all that crap, er, stuff. The marketing machinery of the Hobby thus is entirely geared to convincing sheeple into being excited enough about the 400th baseball set of the year to stand in line at the local card store and snarf up the new shiny like a druggie at a meth party. Part and parcel of that manipulation is a focus on the Lotto aspect of breaking new product: yes, it’s true, folks! This box of shiny shit might just change your life when you hit the 1 of 1 cherry smack knob-gobbler insert of some dude who hit .240 at Barstow! The entire Hobby press focuses relentlessly on the latest 1 of 1, signed patch card going for big bucks: the Hobby needs it and the hobby press is its symbiote. Without that hype secret sauce, it is just more shiny shit pouring into a sea of shiny shit expanding like that plastic blob in the Pacific; if it doesn’t sell, the marketing budgets get slashed and ad revenue falls, and the Hobby publishers can’t buy their kids the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip for Christmas. All Collectors hear about are the hypes and the hits and not the joys of spending 20 years meticulously collecting a vintage set because the hype pays the bills.
I hate it, personally. I am saddened to watch the greedy rat-bros of the world dive into the cesspool of gambling and desperation of the Hobby with their obnoxious pseudo investment speak and swim out sleeker and richer than ever at the expense of so many dummies who they seduced into spending their rent money on pack breaks. I am not saying that I want some loon to shoot those greasy little turds like an insurance CEO, but I would not want to be on that jury, either. As for their customers, I hate the lack of historical interest (never mind knowledge) that the shiny shit Lotto junkies bring to this thing of ours.
And yet...I see a positive to it for Collectors. Seriously.
Working a good local show is a great way to gain some perspective. You are sometimes witness to the moment a Hobby victim becomes a Collector. I saw a handful of Collectors emerge at the last show I worked. They got excited over vintage cards. It wasn’t excitement at the number on the slab, nor was it a flipper’s predatory shark smile. Instead, I saw genuine interest and excitement over cards. I saw Collectors fall in love. Just as I felt 50+ years ago when I held my first 1952 Topps card.
My thesis is that a percentage of the shiny shitters will become Collectors, intrigued with vintage, it just takes time and baby steps. I think that explains some of the boom in junk wax, especially the mid-1990s-2000’s foil and advanced materials cards. Aesthetically, those issues are similar to the drugs of choice in modern, so they feel comfortable with the cards, but the cards are 20-40 years old now, made before a sizable number of the sheeple were born. As they gain comfort with older cards, they will venture back in time and become full-fledged vintage Collectors. That’s why I am not a sky-is-falling type over vintage collecting. It just takes time for shiny shitters to transmogrify from worm to butterfly, but they will. Just give them time, OGs, and don’t hate on them too much because they are not the problem.
Here is the irony that older Collectors also need to recognize when bitching about the young’uns bad habits: we complained about the same behavior watching kids 20-30 years ago. Kids busting packs and leaving the commons for dead on the tabletop (the only valid point is that they are litterbugs). Chasing inserts. Hyping rookies (Super Joe Charbonneau or Kevin Maas or Greg Jefferies anyone?). We saw all of that stuff firsthand at shows 20-30 years ago. The only difference is social media and the 24/7 card news cycle means that we see it everywhere all the time and it feels overwhelming.
Lest we forget, fellow Collectors, we did the same stuff, just not as publicly. In the late-1990s I went to a K-Mart (it was a store) near my office at least once a week because they had a backlog of junk wax (Zenith, Summit, Select, Gallery, etc.) that they would blow out. Ten bucks a box and I could feed my pack busting monkey. I could find abundant early junk wax, pre-insert, for next to nothing, at my LCS and I’d bust a cheap box of 1981 Fleer or Donruss too. Where do you think all of the commons and base cards went? At first, I piled them up and gave them to children’s hospitals and wards. So did everyone else, apparently; the hospitals stopped taking them. It was a tsunami of junk. Next, it was Goodwill. When that became too much work, they went straight into the blue can. I don’t bust packs when I find unopened junk wax in the wild now because a lot of the unopened is worth so much more that the opened result. Wish I’d hung onto a case or two of that 1981 Fleer that cost me $20 a box and now sells north of $250 a box. But when I find stuff now, well…Just last weekend, I bought two large collections of junk wax era cards. Super cheap. 95% went right into recycling. I pulled the relative handful of resale-worthy cards and a few (like a 1986 Donruss Mattingly I found in a set I broke up) that upgraded my collection.
We Collectors value vintage commons because there aren’t boatloads of them in perfect condition readily available. The Hobby newbs do not value modern commons because there are boatloads of them in perfect condition readily available. Both are right.
So, to my fellow Collectors complaining about the sorry state of affairs now, you are right about the Hobby but you are wrong about Collecting. Just look at the history of the Hobby, as opposed to the history of Collecting; what is happening now in the Hobby is greedy, cyclical and has nothing to do with Collecting. It isn’t a slam, just the latest variation on the Hobby’s overriding theme:
“Sonny it’s money that matters, hear what I say
It’s money that matters in the USA
It’s money that matters
Now you know that it’s true
It’s money that matters whatever you do”
--Randy Newman It’s Money That Matters
Sit back in your convertibles and sing along.
I am pleased to present an eBay Jackass of the Week. After his bottom-feeder 50% offer was auto-rejected, we have this exchange:
Jackass: Why is shipping so high for this snapshot?
Me: eBay calculates the shipping. USPS rates changed in July. They eliminated the tiered pricing system for items under 1#. See the note in my description.
J: Snapshot is shipping as a package LOL
Oh, we want to be snarky. Now I could go all Joe Pesci on him:
Me: LOL? What did you say? LOL how?
Jackass: Just... you know... LOL.
Me: You mean, let me understand this cause, you know maybe it’s me, it’s a little fucked up maybe, but LOL how, I mean LOL like I’m a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I’m here to fucking amuse you? What do you mean LOL, LOL how?
Jackass: Just... you know, LOL, what?
Me: No, no, I don’t know, you said it. How do I know? You said LOL. How the fuck is it LOL, what the fuck is so LOL?
But I do agree with putting him on the spot:
Me: OK, how would you ship it?
Jackass: PWE
Yeah, PWE on eBay…because no eBay buyer ever falsely claimed that an item went missing in the mail when shipped PWE. If I could shift all risk of loss to the buyer, if the buyer could sign a waiver that eBay would honor, OK, but under eBay’s relentless pound-the-seller-in-the-ass strict liability system, not a risk I want to take so some cheapskate can buy a $20 item.
Jackass.