01
Collections bought
Boxes, binders, whole closets. Brought in without an appointment, priced at the counter while you watch.
Cash or trade, your call
We say the buy price out loud before we touch anything in the box.
Somebody walks in most weeks with a parent's collection and no idea whether it is worth four hundred dollars or four. That conversation happens across the counter, in front of you, with the price guide open. You can say no and take the box home.
Nine pockets, and that is the whole shop
A binder page holds nine cards. So does this shop, more or less. Everything it does is in one of these.
02
Singles
Sorted by sport, then by year. Vintage in the case, everything else in the boxes you are allowed to dig through.
25c to about $400
03
The dime box
Two long boxes by the door, always full, deliberately not picked over. This is where a nine year old starts.
10c a card, 15 for a dollar
04
Sealed wax
Current-year baseball, football and basketball, at what the box actually costs rather than what a hobby shop wishes it cost.
$24 to $210 a box
05
Supplies
Penny sleeves, top loaders, one-touch magnetics, nine-pocket pages, 800-count boxes. The unglamorous half of the counter.
From $3
06
Grading submissions
We fill out the form, photograph the card, insure the parcel and hand you the tracking number. Turnaround is the grader's, not ours.
$12 a card plus their fee
07
Consignment
Anything over about $150 we will list and ship for you rather than buy outright, because you keep more of it that way.
18% when it sells
08
Thursday trade night
Six until eight, the tables come out, no entry fee, no buying required. Kids trade for free and are not talked down to.
Thursdays, 6 to 8
09
Finding one thing
Give us the player, the year and the set. If it is not in the boxes we will call around and tell you what it will cost before we get it.
No fee to ask
There is no tenth pocket. We do not do memorabilia authentication, we do not sell comics, and we do not run online-only breaks.
What we pay, and why it is less than the number you found
The price you saw online is the asking price on a listing that may never have sold. What a shop pays is a fraction of what a card actually clears at, because the shop then carries it, insures it and waits. Everybody in this trade knows that and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
- Modern commons, 1987 to 1994. Effectively nothing, and we will say so rather than take them off your hands for two dollars and resell them. That era was printed without limit. Keep them or give them to a kid.
- Modern stars and rookies. Roughly half of what the card has recently sold for, more if it is a player people ask for by name in this building.
- Graded cards. Around sixty to seventy percent of the last comparable sale, because the grade removes the argument about condition.
- Vintage, pre-1970. Judged one card at a time. Condition is the whole conversation and we will show you the two things we are looking at, the corners and the centring, so you can see what we see.
- Sealed product. Sixty to eighty percent of current market, depending on the year and whether the seal is honest.
Trade credit is worth about a third more than cash on every line above, which is not a trick. It costs us less to pay you in inventory.
Photograph to be taken here
- The counter from the customer's side, mid-transaction, a box open and the price guide out. Faces optional, hands not.
- Wide crop, shot on a Thursday evening when the tables are out and the room is not empty.
- No stock photography of cards fanned on a white background. Every shop on the internet has that picture and it says nothing about this room.
Days we are shut
Sunday and Monday, both of them, every week. That is when collections get sorted and priced, and it is the reason anything is ever in order when you walk in on a Tuesday.
| Sunday | Shut |
|---|---|
| Monday | Shut |
| Tuesday to Friday | 10am to 6pm |
| Thursday evening | Open until 8pm for trade night |
| Saturday | 10am to 4pm |