The Cardboard Investment

Razzle Dazzle, Let's Do A Break

Business was going great and we continued to meet new customers and collectors from around the state. Our phones would ring multiple times a week with people trying to sell cards. Almost all of them were never worth our time, and we wasted a lot of time digging through these old boxes finding nothing that we could resell.

Almost every Friday we would host an event at our card shop. Sometimes it was just hanging out with fellow collectors, other times we would open a box or two to show customers what the new products looked like. A few times we even took the gamble of opening up a full case worth of a product just to try and get one of the extremely valuable cards that might be contained within. These cases consisted of 12 boxes and we spent hours opening all of them up in front of our customers. Sometimes we could sell the cards right there to interested buyers. One time we actually pulled a single card that paid for the entire $1000 case that we had purchased. Most of the time it was a loss, but the experience was always worth it.

At one point we started hearing our customers talking about razzing their cards for more money than they could get on Ebay. The idea was exactly that of raffleing off 10 or more spots of a card for whatever price you wanted. Say a card sold for $100 dollars on Ebay, you can sell 10 spots at $15 a spot and people would be willing to buy one or more spots in a chance at winning the card. The buyer gets the card potentially for less than market value, the seller gets more market value. Nine or more people might lose out, but it was a dispensable about of money for some. Everyone is assigned a number and these numbers are put into a random number generator. The number that is generated is the winner, and it is all recorded and timestamped for the participants to see. It became extremely popular on Facebook groups, and is still utilized today.

Boxes and packs of cards continued to increase in price year after year. The values of unopened products from previous years gained more traction as the supply began to dry up. Collectors were now spending hundreds of dollars on opening up a box and sometimes not getting any of the players or teams that they were looking for. Somewhere along the way someone came up with a genius idea of selling player or team spots that buyers could purchase for a certain product. The seller would open a box or a case and then whoever purchased the teams or players for the product received every card of the team or player they bought. These became known as box or case breaks.

These breaks started popping up on Ebay, sometimes with the spots being auctioned off, other times the sellers would list them all as buy it nows with the more popular teams and players going for premiums. Sellers were able to make a larger profit off the unopened boxes, and collectors were able to get only what they might want and not have to spend the exorbitant prices of the new boxes. At first it seemed like a win-win for buyers and sellers.

The first thing I noticed from this new phenomenon was that distributors were now limiting how many boxes and packs brick and mortar stores were getting. The sellers putting on theses breaks seemed to be getting plenty of product, and sometimes would open up dozens of boxes all day long on YouTube for people to watch what cards they might be receiving in the mail.

Some of these sellers started to get a reputation for being untrustworthy. If one of these sellers realized they just pulled a valuable card, they could pretty easily hide it in the video, or edit it out of the video. I am sure it happened time and time again, but with a growing sports card community, word would quickly spread of the breakers to avoid.

There was no true feedback or review system for this new form of card gambling, it was entirely on the honor system and your reputation. Some of these people have now turned this new aspect of the hobby into a full time business. They employ people almost around the clock to host these videos, sort out the cards for the appropriate buyers and ship them out.

With these breaks you have the ability of spending $30 or more for a spot in a break of a product that might cost $200 a box. The downside is you might not get any cards for your $30, but the upside is you could get a $200 card with your $30. You also were not out $200 if you bought the box yourself and didn't get any cards worth anything.

Some people have become addicted to this facet of the hobby, dishing out a portion of their pay check every week in hopes of making a return on their gamble. It is a thrill when you are on the winning side, but all these games of luck and odds are never designed to be in favor of the person buying in.

One thing I learned quickly trying to make a business out of this hobby is that everyone tells you about how well they did on boxes, packs or razzes, but they never tell you about all the losses they took for those small gains.

I had learned a lot in my few short years of being back in the hobby. Times had changed and the hobby was changing with the times.