is this guy barefoot? Ugh.
In my cozy little corner of suburban Raleigh I do occasionally dabble in the retail card aisle of my local Target store. The Wal-Mart near my house has the worst retail card aisle in the history of retail card aisles. My retail purchases tend to be small quantities of products that I am not going to put together as a set, or sometimes something that I am not sure about collecting so I dabble first with some retail.
My wife recently sent me to Target to run a quick errand, so after completing the shopping list I walked through the card aisle and picked up a pick of Donruss Optic. It's a product that I am not going to buy a box of, but I like the looks of some of the cards. If Panini were a licensed card manufacture I would probably be more willing....
So, I quickly grabbed two packs and checked out. I went out to my car, opened the first pack, and flipped through the cards. Pretty nice stuff. Then I went to open the second pack and.......
I really didn't have to do much to open the pack of cards. The top of the pack was slit open with a knife, or a razor. I am not sure how I missed it in Target, probably in too big of hurry, but I felt completely disappointed.
First off, I ended up getting a couple of nice Cardinals cards out of the packs.
I pulled two Magnueris Sierra cards. The colored parallel actually came out of the pack that was cut open, the white base card came out of the sealed pack. I also ended up with a nice looking Yadier Molina card.....
If only Panini would only make cards of catchers wearing their catchers gear........
I will never forget pulling this card out of a pack at the same Target store where I bought my two packs of Donruss Optic. You know who else buys a lot of retail packs? Kids. I work with kids. I have given away packs of retail baseball cards in my class. I have had kids pull really good cards out of packs. One of my best ever was a 2015 Jeter photo variation card.....
That's a tough pull right there and it made the kids day. Guess what happened later that week? Same kid walks into my room with a stack of cards that he and his mom picked up at Wal-Mart. We sat down before school, flipped through the stack and talked about what cards he liked and what players were his favorites.
More recently, I had a students pull a Luis Gonzalez autograph out of a repack box I had bought and given the packs away. Nice looking card numbered out of 25.....
After researching Luis Gonzalez, the student is a Yankees fan, they decided that they liked the idea of pulling an autograph, just not Luis Gonzalez. I brought in a few Yankees autographs and swapped them out for Luis.
I have been on this soapbox before, but there are many adult collectors and not many kid collectors. It would be nice to attract my kids into baseball card collecting, but having people pack search and wreck the chances of a kid getting a nice card out of a retail pack is reprehensible.
How much does a Luis Gonzalez autograph cost? Not enough for grown up to sit on the floor of Target and feel up a bunch of packs of cards for an hour. Just disappointed.
It's scumbags like this that will ruin the hobby for everybody.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
DeleteGood lord....I hope that guy pulled about 17 Allen Webster autos.
ReplyDeleteHenry Owens would also be an acceptable answer.
DeleteIt's disgusting what these people do...the stores need to do a better job of not allowing this to happen.
ReplyDeleteThe bad thing is that a young collector will askMom or Dad for cards, excited for what might be inside...the poor kid doesn't know guys like the idiot pictured above has ruined any chance he has of opening up a pack that will make him a fan for life.
Agreed, too few kids collect. We need to do everything we can to support kids who show interest in collecting cards.
DeleteUgh, a split open pack. How dirty. Always feels great to pull something from a retail pack that some dirtbag may have missed.
ReplyDeleteI was happy with the Sierras. Not the biggest, flashiest name, but he's a player I've wanted to work on collecting.
DeleteCan I say "white-trash"? NO shoes, seriously. Why does store management allow this? Isn't someone manning the cameras? Recently friend and I stumbled upon a couple of guys going through the cards at Target. They had their backs to us trying to hide whatever it was they were doing. We snuck right up, reached in front of them for a pack, catching them by complete surprise. They began having a loud and obviously phony conversation about the selection and left immediately, walking out of the store. My friends said she saw packs in their hands, searched AND stolen. Nice. The Kaline you pulled way back when - really nice!
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome that you have students who are interested in cards. I just started my table olympics project and they're making personal trading cards based on actual baseball cards. I only had one kid seem semi-interested in looking through the stack of cards I brought in this year. Normally... there's at least four or five.
ReplyDeleteP.S. There was a time when I was seriously annoyed by pack searchers. These days... I'm just embarrassed for them. It's like watching someone get caught in a lie. Hard for me to even look at the person.
Way back in the day, when I taught in St. Louis, I used to do baseball cards as part of a biography project. We made some early 1990s Studio cards, but the students chose the subject of their card. Turned out really cool.
DeleteIts sad, I think that will be me in a few years.
ReplyDelete