The Junk Wax Era- when did it start?

[gregr2]

Was the junk wax era perpetuated by Topps and the other card manufacturers as a way to increase profits?

[Rich Klein]

Still exists 81-86, I use 1987-94 AKA the peak years of the hobby boom to be the overproduced era. That ended with a crash in August, 1994 when the Baseball Strike began

[D. Bergin]

It seems like Topps really increased production in 1987. The other companies upped their production to, but really spiked the numbers in 1988 I think.

I lost track of how many monster boxes of '88 Donruss I've tossed in the trash each time I moved or tried to make space in the house.

Junk wax for football, hockey, basketball, probably begins in 1989.

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by gregr2

Was the junk wax era perpetuated by Topps and the other card manufacturers as a way to increase profits?

There was a huge demand at the time, so yes.

As soon as every Tom, Dick and Harry started putting away full cases of new cards to pay for their future retirement or kids education, the junk era started in full swing.

[tulsaboy]

Rich-can you explain your comment about 1981-1986? I'm not challenging, just curious. I wonder if production of those years was significantly higher than it was during, say, 1975-1980, or if more people were becoming aware during that era of the importance of keeping unopened product (and keeping their cards in good shape). The second explanation would inform the reality that a box of 1982 is easier and much cheaper to source than one of 1978. If all other things are equal, it is hard to say that a span of 4 years totally explains the 500% or so disparity in the price of unopened product.

[gregr2]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

There was a huge demand at the time, so yes.

As soon as every Tom, Dick and Harry started putting away full cases of new cards to pay for their future retirement or kids education, the junk era started in full swing.

Thanks for the information!

[Rich Klein]

That there were certain times of "wax" explosion

There is definately more wax and cards issued in 1978 then in the pre-78 era and then in 1981, especially with the three companies there was a major uptick in card production. That is why you see a ton more

78 sets then 77 and 1981 sets then 1980, etc.

81 to 86 was definately a time with big production but the real explosion began in 1987.

Hard to explain but 87 became "the year" for the over production and more unopened was saved that year in part because of the then immense Topps (and Donruss and Fleer) RC crew.

Then 88-91 at the very least were printed till te cows came home and even 92-94 was very heavily produced. Remember by 1993 at Beckett we were shipping over 1 Million Baseball magazines a month and selling a good proportion of those magazines. And one of the primary reasons was the interest in new products. The reason there is slightly less 92-94 product out there then the 87-91 era is there were more products in those years and thus a diffusion of those products make for seemingly less out there.

But there are still a ton of singles until about 94 so I'm OK with 87-94 as the overproduction era

Rich

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Rich Klein

That there were certain times of "wax" explosion

There is definately more wax and cards issued in 1978 then in the pre-78 era and then in 1981, especially with the three companies there was a major uptick in card production. That is why you see a ton more

78 sets then 77 and 1981 sets then 1980, etc.

81 to 86 was definately a time with big production but the real explosion began in 1987.

Hard to explain but 87 became "the year" for the over production and more unopened was saved that year in part because of the then immense Topps (and Donruss and Fleer) RC crew.

Then 88-91 at the very least were printed till te cows came home and even 92-94 was very heavily produced. Remember by 1993 at Beckett we were shipping over 1 Million Baseball magazines a month and selling a good proportion of those magazines. And one of the primary reasons was the interest in new products. The reason there is slightly less 92-94 product out there then the 87-91 era is there were more products in those years and thus a diffusion of those products make for seemingly less out there.

But there are still a ton of singles until about 94 so I'm OK with 87-94 as the overproduction era

Rich

All true.

There also was a buildup of a few other things. Before about 1980-1 there wasn't much for card sales through large retailers. It was almost entirely through distributors to local convenience stores. K-mart carried packs and albums in 74 and newer, but not in huge quantity compared to what came later. Large toy chains like KB toy and hobby and Toys R Us, child world etc generally carried nothing or nearly nothing. Maybe a box at the register, but that was about the limit. Even non-sports could be a challenge, out of probably 10-15 corner stores in my town only 3-4 carried the 4th series of star wars, and only one carried the last series.

When things went to three companies in 81 that started to change. Large retail started carrying more, usually all three sets which meant moving it off the counter and onto its own shelf. Small stores didn't always carry all three, but did usually carry more than just one. A friend of mine worked in his family 5+10 and convinced his father to carry whatever cards he could get. Everything sold well, and he gave me a couple boxes at a really cheap price for suggesting they carry more cards.

By 83 big retail carried everything and had fairly large stocks. Child world carried the 83s as uncut sheets as well as wax, cello and rack packs.

Between 77 and 83 another thing that happened was a big increase in the number of card shops. when I moved near Boston in 77 there was one card shop in town, a really unusual thing. By 81 there was another card shop, two antique shops selling cards, and a couple people selling out of their homes. And there were at least 6-7 full time dealers in the Boston area.

That only increased by 4-86 and beyond. Ordering directly from any of the companies in 77 was hard. It required a full shop, as the required pics of the storefront and interior. By the early 90's all they required sometimes was a business license and enough money to make the minimum order. So some flea market guys could buy direct.

And of course, they sold/printed at least as much as people ordered. Good for Topps Fleer and Donruss short term, not so good in the long term. But I imagine it would have been hard for an exec at any company to pass up short term profits the size of what they were while the competition was making that money.

Steve B

[tulsaboy]

Thanks, guys. That is a helpful analysis. Without anything better than simple observation to back up my opinion, I tend to agree. I feel like in the late 1980's and early 1990's, almost every dealer had lots of 87 and later unopened product available at modest prices. The 1985 and earlier (and sometimes 1986) was somewhat available, but much less so than the later stuff. Looking at the prices being asked (and received) right now for various product (and high-grade singles) for pre-1987 stuff, it seems that there is a pretty clear deliniation.

I have been astonished lately at the prices being realized even for 1979 and 1980 unopened and high-grade singles. I would think that there is a substantial amount of unopened product still available, but the prices make me wonder if that supply is rapidly dwindling.

Thanks for your thoughts!

[David W]

I agree with 1987 for Topps. Topps was still the company everyone wanted, Fleer and Donruss were afterthoughts.

In 1987 Donruss and Fleer were clearly not as popular and not sold nearly as much in big box stores and warehouse clubs. I'd go to Sam's Club and buy 2-3 boxes of 87 Topps, I don't recall them carrying anything else.

I'd be curious to know especially what Fleer's production numbers were compared to Topps, I bet a lot less.

By 1990 everyone had ramped the presses and Score had jumped in along with Upper Deck and Leaf, and from 1990 to 92 or so there was product everywhere. I had a small card shop for a year in a small town, and you really couldn't hardly give Topps away by 1990, they all wanted Leaf or UD.

That was also the time when 87 Fleer rookies (Bonds, Kevin Mitchel and Will Clark) became the desired rookies from the 87 sets, and were much tougher to find in the pre internet days. 88 Fleer was more sought after also than Topps. Glavine's rookie had a definite premium at the time in Fleer, plus the Billy Ripken FF card pushed 88 Fleer to the top.

Just my random ramblings and recollections.

[Zach Wheat]

Originally Posted by Rich Klein

That there were certain times of "wax" explosion

There is definately more wax and cards issued in 1978 then in the pre-78 era and then in 1981, especially with the three companies there was a major uptick in card production. That is why you see a ton more

78 sets then 77 and 1981 sets then 1980, etc.

81 to 86 was definately a time with big production but the real explosion began in 1987.

Hard to explain but 87 became "the year" for the over production and more unopened was saved that year in part because of the then immense Topps (and Donruss and Fleer) RC crew.

Then 88-91 at the very least were printed till te cows came home and even 92-94 was very heavily produced. Remember by 1993 at Beckett we were shipping over 1 Million Baseball magazines a month and selling a good proportion of those magazines. And one of the primary reasons was the interest in new products. The reason there is slightly less 92-94 product out there then the 87-91 era is there were more products in those years and thus a diffusion of those products make for seemingly less out there.

But there are still a ton of singles until about 94 so I'm OK with 87-94 as the overproduction era

Rich

Interesting insight Rich. Not much more to add other than for it was really noticeable with the 1989 issues.

Z Wheat

[the 'stache]

I concur, 1987 is when everything started ramping up in a big way as far as baseball card production went. I still like the set, though, as they represent a fun time in my youth. I hold on to a lot of them, not because of any monetary value, but because of what they represented. I remember cracking open wax box after wax box, looking for Jose Canseco, Wally Joyner, Danny Tartabul, B.J. Surhoff, Bo Jackson, Mark McGwire, etc. I was a kid, and I didn't grasp that more of them were being produced. I was 16, and working my first part time job. It meant I could buy more cards than ever before. Just my dumb luck I wasn't 16 in 1983. I might have a stack of Ryne Sandberg cards instead of Todd Worrell cards, lol.



Screw you, Topps, and your little "Monopoly piece" All Rookie Team Awards.

You know how many of these darned things I still have?

[HasselhoffsCheeseburger]

I stumbled across some interesting information a while back while researching a particular Donruss product.

Topps sales went from ~500 million cards/year in the late-1970s to ~1 billion by the mid-1980s (that's sales, not production. Obviously production was much higher).

Donruss saw production increases each year in the early-1980s, and 100% increases in BOTH 1986 and 1987 (twice as much in 1986 than 1985, and twice as much in 1987 than in 1986).

In 1987, Topps had a 50% market share, Donruss ~25%, and Fleer a little less than 25%.

While these aren't firm production numbers, I don't think it's unreasonable to use them to extrapolate a ballpark set of parameters. Obviously, you're looking at major production increases for Topps even when comparing late-70s to early-80s, with gargantuan increases starting in 1986. But more importantly, this is important information for the people that seem to think that they'll see future price increases with 1980s that we're seeing with 1970s currently. There's just too much disparity in the amount of product produced to draw any kind of correlations.

But, and this is just my opinion, if you're purchasing cards solely for an investment, you're almost always going to be disappointed. The people I know that have done well did so because they collected what they enjoyed and then chose to get out when a trend caught fire. Since I've started collecting unopened the most excited I've got over an acquisition and the items that bring me the most joy having them in my collection aren't the 1970s items, they've been the hard-to-find stuff from the "junk wax era." Because that's when collecting was the most fun for me as a kid.

[CardTarget]

You can still buy packs of 1984 Topps for like $.50. I'd say 84-94.

[tulsaboy]

Where are you buying them for that price??? Right now it is hard to get a box for anything less than 60 a box. Not that it makes that much of a difference. The fact that you can still get 30 year old wax for that price is amazing. Would be like getting 52 Topps for 1.50 a pack in 1982. Obviously that wasn't the case, but it should be an indicator of the level of production involved...

[Hot Springs Bathers]

I agree with Rich's note on 1981-86 being added to the over-production years. The "guessed at" number for pre-81 would mean that the mushroom happened in 1981.

While Rich won't like this, the explosion and over-production began with Rickey Henderson and the monthly Beckett introduction. At that point the manufacurers knew they had a good thing going and we will never know how many of these cards were printed.

In 1991 I had a part owner of one of the big three come into our wholesale warehouse to ask me if I wanted cases of past years cards going back to 1981. If I bought "x" number of cases he promised me several cases from an other sport that happened to have a rather hot rookie card from 1986/87. His inference was that they had stockpiled tons of them.

My partner has always maintained that anything that could be printed over and over again perhaps even today could not be worth anything. With what we know about some of the folks running the card companies during this era I think it is possible that anything and everything went on during the boom years.