OFF TARGET
Sean McElroy was recently at one of his local card shops in Hanover, Mass., talking with the owner. The two had plenty to discuss about the red-hot industry.
A guy came in with four blaster boxes of 2020-21 Prizm Basketball he had purchased from Walmart. The guy was looking to sell that retail product to the hobby store owner.
His asking price? $500 for all four blasters. The guy would have purchased them right off the shelf at Walmart for $20 apiece, so $80 for the four. That’s a heck of a markup.
The shop owner and the owner of the Prizm boxes negotiated and agreed on $420.
“The [shop] owner told me that he hadn’t seen boxes like that in the last year,” said McElroy, who is a card collector and also one of the hosts of TTM-Cast, a sports collectibles podcast. “That was the first one he saw, so that’s why he said he was throwing down $400 because he knows that somebody else is going to come through that door and is going to pay $500, $500-plus to get those boxes.”
This scenario has become all too common in the trading card industry, and it’s happening nationwide. Trading cards at retail
