AVALANCHE OF DEMAND
The task is daunting, but as each day passes, Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) is making a small dent in its backlog of trading cards that need to be graded.
PSA was reportedly behind by approximately 10 million cards that were submitted by collectors when it suspended its Value, Economy, Regular and Express services on March 30. PSA’s Super Express service, which costs $300 per card, is still available.
The California-based company is working as hard as it can to grade as many cards as possible each day. Nat Turner, executive chairman of Collectors Universe, PSA’s parent company, told Sports Collectors Digest on April 21 that PSA is currently grading cards that were submitted as far back as seven months ago.
“We’re doing tens of thousands of cards every day,” Turner said. “I’d say it depends on the day. We’ve consistently been north of 20,000 cards a day in output.”
PSA is the largest third-party trading card authentication and grading company and has a solid reputation as one of the leading — if not the leading — graders in the hobby. PSA wants to stay that way, but it isn’t going to risk its integrity to cut corners.
“These are largely human processes … and human process is pretty hard to scale as well. In our case, we’re not willing to sacrifice on quality, so we’re not just going to hire a bunch of people off the street and say, ‘Here, have at it,’ and put cards in cases,” Turner said. “We’re never going to do that. Even as the cards are piling up, literally behind them, that’s just not something we’re willing to do.”
Turner calls the sudden flood of card submissions during the pandemic “an avalanche of demand.”
