Anyone who knows me knows that I love email. I love getting it as well as sending it, and if you've ever written to me here at About then you know that I can sometimes write a short book as a response. I especially love getting mail from people telling me how lucky they've been. If you open a pack and make a great pull then I love hearing about it. Lately, however, my mail has been tilting a bit toward the negative side. No, it's not people writing to tell me they disagree with my latest reviews, instead it's been people complaining about being ripped off. Time and again the source of people's displeasure has been the Shop At Home network.
I'm an addict. I freely admit it. I can't get enough of those guys on Shop At Home screaming about the great sportscard deals they've got for me. My fiancé has to pry the remote out of my hands at two in the morning so she can finally get to sleep (apparently Don West's voice is not a lullaby to her). Don't get me wrong. I don't buy anything. I just watch for the sheer entertainment. I mean, no one really buys that stuff, right? Wrong! How could I be so naive?
I think what finally made me write about this was a letter from a visitor to our site last week who shared with me his tragic story. He had purchased a 3200 count box of cards that had been advertised as a "blowout", filled with big stars, inserts, and rookies. When it arrived he sat down with his 8 year old son to open it up as a start to his son's collection. What he found weren't the great cards that the SAH host had shown on tv. What he found was a box full of basically worthless cards. They were mainly commons, a few stars, and virtually no inserts or rookies. He scanned some of the cards to show me. I can't decide what was more shocking, that they were early 90's commons, or that they looked like someone had used them to scrape bubblegum off their shoe.
In the end it was the 8 year old son that got me to write this story. According to his dad he no longer has any interest in sportscards at all and it might be quite some time before he can get him back into card collecting. The father sent the cards back and got a refund so all he was out was the shipping, but it's the fact that I now can see that people really do buy these "deals" and they can turn people against card collecting. Our hobby needs more young collectors and we certainly don't need a big company turning them off to a fun pastime.
Grab Bag Mania
I remember the good old days of doing weekend card shows. Lug my 30 or 40 boxes to the show, set up my table, and work pretty darned hard all weekend to make a few dollars (most of which I spent
on more cards). Honest work if I say so myself, but there were always a few guys who felt they needed to cheat. These were the guys who set up their games of chance
and "grab bags" where one lucky person "could" go home with that beautiful 73 Topps Mike Schmidt rookie! Of course most people went home short a few dollars with some nice
1981 Fleer commons, and so the legitimate, hard working dealers complained until shows either banned or discouraged the grab bag games.
Next came Ebay, kind of the online version of the old card show with all the buyers looking for who's got the best price. Sure enough, those old lazy grab baggers found Ebay and realized that they could sell plenty of nothing for a few bucks and never ever have to give away the prized cards. Ebay's been working on stopping them, but it's a tough job.
So now we have Shop at Home and it's more of the same only in a much grander
scale. Before anyone complains that I've written this without actually
buying a "blowout" or other special item from SAH, let me point out
that it's not what you get in your box that I'm going to complain about.
I'm also not going to complain about the fact that they often quote completely
inaccurate prices on single cards and sets. Nor will I make a big deal
over the fact that they regularly offer these singles and sets for 30 to 100%
over the current market values. After all, they have the right to ask for
whatever price they want on their cards, just like you or me.
Next Page: Blue Chips or Cow Chips
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