Toy R Us around 1987, I would have been 7. I had always had a shoe box full of baseball cards. My Mom would buy packs for my brother and I occasionally as a reward for doing chores and more often for not fighting with each other. We'd tear open the packs looking for Pirates but inevitably they all just got tossed into the shoebox.
Toy R Us is where I discovered my first price guide and implored my parents to let me buy it. They did, and I spent the following 3 hours at home looking up the value of each and every card I had in that shoe box. The gem that I found that day in my shoebox, a 1985 Topps Don Mattingly worth around $12 I think. I had zero concept of the relationship between condition and value, I mean the guide told me it was worth $12!
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