I'm pretty sure the ole save 15% scenarios could be just a bit of fairy dust. Virtually every time one is listed, I get gung-ho and jump all over it, but am I truly saving anything?? Dunno. I usually use sites like PSA Auction Prices Realized to get a decent idea of what I should expect to pay for certain cards I want to grab up. A week or two ago there was a discount, so I purchased a couple of Mantles (generally, all other things aside, at the cheapest/close to the cheapest prices listed for the particular grades) and, man, the pricing was nowhere near what it 'should have been.' Of course, Mantles are highly sought after, so it's just the wild west out there. The comparably graded ones I DIDN'T buy were overpriced into the ionosphere.
I guess it boils down to how much stock you put into tools like VCP, etc. If something 'should be' available for $100, yet all of the cards (and there are many) on ebay are listed for $200 and higher (and none are OBO), you gotta wonder how realistic said tools are. So we save 15% on a card that is purposefully way 'overpriced' to begin with?? The $100 price tag in this scenario doesn't reflect reality at all. If I want the card, then it's going to cost me two c-notes, not one. The whole thing is kind of funny in a way.
With the latest 15% off special, I bought these three 1961 cards:
PSA 8 #572, Brooks Robinson All Star, which was netted for about $90
PSA 8 #580, Al Kaline All Star, which was netted for about $85
PSA 7 #417, Juan Marichal RC, which was netted for about $100
The first two look real nice and are basically always listed for the 'before' price I paid for them. The Marichal is a little O/C and there's a bit of scuffing on it at the border from the printing process. The label shows it to be an early card graded by PSA. You could argue a little that I bought the slab rather than the card, but the other 7's were $200 and up, so I went for it to knock it off of my need list. Not sure how I did VCP-wise, but I think I did pretty well on the trio...but in reality, did I?? Dunno.
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