Plus, the modern market has been crashing hard and "investors" of the past couple of years seem over-leveraged in depreciating assets. If PSA hired 1,000 more and bought buildings to put them all in, it may not be the best decision in the long run. They have already announced their intention to open up multiple remote locations, but Southern California is an expensive place to run a company based on near minimum wage labor, with $500K houses the norm.

I have visions of PSA Grading Locations of Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, along with California and NJ for Autographs. That would be awesome.

I totally agree. This gets to the heart of my original question in that it seems then that their decision not to do more expansion of capacity is, in a way, admitting a lack of belief in their own product/service.

Contrast this with the approach SGC has taken, which seems to be "send us all your cards, we want more!"

That’s a really interesting perspective. Hard to not agree with!

If you're having trouble hiring, you're not paying enough. Period. $35k is incredibly low for a business charging $100-$150 per card.

SGC seems to have solved the backlog issue by using the primary economic principle from Econ 101: Backlog gets a little heavy, raise prices a bit, temporarily. Backlog gets down to normal levels, lower prices a bit to ensure steady flow of new submissions.

Result is, SGC can maintain service with reasonable timeframes for their customers, as well as some stability for their own business situation, with the managed submission rate.

Now they just need to establish a registry, preferably a non TPG specific one, to put themselves on even footing with PSA, among the registry crowd.

If they started a registry I would switch all my psa cards (which is 2/3 of my collection) over to sgc. For any sgc decision makers watching.

SGC won't do that, but if Who's Bobby?(tm) of VCP does it, they would be a beneficiary.

I’d have a bunch to cross to SGC as well.

I'm going to push back against this statement. First of all, the max allowed per sub is 500, not 5000.

And yes, I know you probably mean 5000 cards from one person broken down by 10 subs x 500. But I do not think they get done any earlier then the 200 card person, especially these days.

Wonder if the $12-$15 per commons for set Registry Builders ever comes back.

Have worked in small businesses my entire life, sometimes there is no more money

And it's not really a minimum of $100 they're charging right now, since the vast majority of cards still in the backlog are still on $10-15 bulk submissions. And going forward, PSA (Turner) has expressed interest on bringing back much cheaper service levels for set collectors. So this high prices are the only prices phase "seems" to be only a blip.

PSA recently acquired CardLadder.com. I'm pretty sure the primary reason for teh acquisition was to be able to have a real-time price guide for them to use for stuff like this.

Does anyone else think PSA/Collectors Universe could be sold to Fanatics down the road maybe in 3-5 years ?
I have a feeling it could happen and would be huge for the hobby.

That would be awesome. They could make, grade, and sell all under one roof. What more could we as collectors ask for.

I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if it happens.

If they marked the slab with some special label stating the card was printed, slabbed, and sold without anyone having the chance to alter it. They should be able to get a huge premium. Add to that the manufactured rarity they could make beyond silly cash from that service. Why share the profit when they could make it all.

But would they want to admit that 90% of the stuff they were producing was less than perfect? Or would their quality control not permit anything other than 10s to leave the factory?

I can imagine buying unopened product direct from the factory and finding out it had been graded, by them, in the 7 to 8 range.....

Exactly

I'd opined about that in earlier threads/posts and wondered if Fanatics may not just take over the distribution from breakers themselves, and in so doing, maybe bypass the TPGs altogether and offer to slab cards acquired directly from them as "Uncirculated".

But can also see them maybe looking to acquire a TPG as well. No sense in reinventing the wheel, right?

That’s right most likely would be a very smart business move for Mr. Turner he has a great business mind.

I thought they were already heavily invested in CSG as well, or had overlapping ownership groups. I don't see them making a play for PSA, but they could buy out SGC to handle the eBay authentication.

Yup. No conflict of interest there at all...

Some random observations:

Fanatics already authenticates and has the tools to slab:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/wdAAA...3I/s-l1600.jpg
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/dZgAA...G3I/s-l500.jpg

It doesn't need to buy PSA, just expand its existing capacity.

PSA has been essentially shut-down for a year. It has distorted the market for slabbed cards and will continue to do so. I think part of the price surge on some sets is lack of additional PSA cards in the market. Pre-pandemic you could send in a standard-level order and have an expectation of getting it back in 30-90 days. Not ideal but not impossible. A business could establish a reasonable flow of inventory by staggering submissions. That has been impossible for a year and doesn't look likely again for at least another year. Clog up the supply chain and it clobbers the whole marketing machinery.

SGC is definitely the main beneficiary of PSA's backlog. If you follow postwar cards at auction you must have seen how many are getting into SGC holders now compared to pre-backlog. I never thought I would see SGC slabs on 1952 T Mantle, 1954T Aaron, etc. It is the only viable established TPG for maintaining any decent inventory flow or for having less valuable but slab-worthy cards encapsulated for auction.

CSG is about to ruin its timeliness reputation with its nutty deal with eBay (see the other thread).

So I agree with you that SGC was the beneficiary last year, but that moreso because SGC was the bandaid because people couldn't submit with PSA. I am very interested to see how SCG does this year.

I recently saw a chart that PSA graded last month more than 6x the amount of cards SGC graded. With the decrease in PSA grading prices, does that continue? We will see.

It's worse for submitters, but much better for PSA.

Years ago I had a very large international company that became a customer for a few months.

They were among the first to abandon just in time delivery on all their parts and supplies and go to an integrated supply model.
Largely because the US plant at least had something like 400 suppliers, and they studied costs of buying anything.
Get 3 quotes
Pick the best one
Get the purchase approved
Issue the purchase order

Apparently the average cost of just issuing the PO was around $400 in the late 90's.
So they first got rid of the places they'd bought a handful of items from. Then the middle size suppliers, and made deals with a handful of large suppliers to buy everything in a category from them at a set markup. Open books on both sides. :eek: At the tens if not hundreds of millions it made perfect sense to issue two Purchase orders a year to six different suppliers. (Their small package shipping alone was in the $40Million range.)

I got on the list despite being small because the head of purchasing was tired of buying a specialized item where he had to tell the seller what page it was on in their own catalog. I knew both our numbers and the big suppliers pretty much from memory. So I saved him a LOT of time.

More remarkably, they paid in 10 days when most huge corporations were holding the money for 90 days because they could.

Can see the sports league and player ownership concerns looking to develop a more vertical organization structure and approach to take advantage of all the potential profit activities relating to their product. They're already doing it with the formation and ongoing operations of Fanatics, followed by the acquisition of licensing rights of the major US sports for card production, and most recently with the acquisition of Topps. So now the sports leagues and players have gained control of the sports card manufacturing market relative to major US sports. Question is, will they try to go even further then and attempt to take over the distribution aspects, maybe trying to cut out wholesalers and breakers. And then expand even further into the secondary market aspects, such as forming/acquiring their own auction house, vault service, and even venturing into the TPG arena. My guess is the sports leagues and players are tired of seeing others profit so much off of what they do and their fame and popularity.

And as for Nat Turner, he would be one of the business people/concerns that Fanatics and their ownership would be looking to possibly supplant or displace, or maybe even just acquire at some point, just like was done to Topps.

Just look at how the various sports leagues are trying to partner up and embrace and align themselves with the gambling industry, all in an attempt to get at least some part of that profit for themselves as well. The difficulty there is in not looking like total a--hole hypocrites who permanently ban people for being involved in gambling and with gamblers, and suddenly doing a complete turnaround and being in bed with them. I guess the thinking is maybe that if only a few people are involved with gamblers and making money off of it, that is the horror and damnation of the respective sports. But if maybe the sports leagues and the players can ALL make some profit off of holding hands and becoming involved with gamblers and the gambling industry, well.......that's maybe a horse of a different color!

Makes you begin to wonder, were the Black Sox players permanently banned because they made money they got from some gamblers, or was it really because they didn't figure out how to have what they did make money for everyone else involved in baseball as well, especially the owners?

I was informed today that my PSA order was being shipped out.
It ended up being way faster than I expected.
Sent in 3 cards at the beginning of the month for their "regular" ($100) service.
They received them on 1/11 and I got the grades today and it moved to shipping complete status.

15 total day turnaround once they received them...I was expecting month(s).

So are most non-bulk subs coming back quickly like this? ^^^^ Or are there still people waiting for regular subs from Oct/Nov/Dec?

There were no regular subs available until December. I sent a 180 card Regular sub in the first week of January, already in assembly.

Appreciate the info Scott.

Looks like the $50 economy sub is back now as well.

https://www.psacard.com/pricing

Nope. That is by lottery only for 5 cards. Maybe in a few more months it will be open to the public.

Sorry about that. My mistake, I saw some group submitters on YouTube taking subs at $60/card (15 cards per person per week) and thought this level was open.

Not for regular dudes. PSA opened it up to bulk submitters despite some bulk submitters now going bankrupt when their bill from PSA comes due.

PSA allocation event
 

Hi all--

In case it's useful to hear--I did the PSA "allocation event" today to have a chance to submit 5 cards for $50 economy. They have a link on twitter one hour before the official time, you have to go there anytime before it starts. When it starts, you are then randomly assigned a # (I was 4676) and then it counts down from there and gives you an estimated wait time (mine was 50 mins). I waited...and after about 20-25 minutes it was over. Seemed like they got through about 1700 of them. I had heard that the "magic number" was like 1500 and that seems about right.

I know many of you have no interest in this! But in case anyone was wondering. It was fine, you had to stay on the computer during the wait but you could be doing other work, browsing, etc as long as you kept the tab on your internet browser active.

That's it--Jeff

Psa Lottery?
 

I waited as well for a bit. I then realized my chances were slim and the cards would probably be gone way too long.

In my humble opinion, PSA is still closed to me. My timer should not be counting down as using them is no longer an option. I refuse to pay $100 per card to get a card graded, and having to participate in a lottery simply to get a "half-off" slot doesn't appeal to me as well.

I'm 0-for-4. I've found them to be an utter waste of time. I think the 1,500 figure is probably correct. I still don't see how they can allocate only 20% of their resources to get these done within 90 days AND continue to clear the backlog. Color me skeptical.

It would be nice if PSA would do something solely for long-time submitters who continue to be shoved to the back of the line by the newbies.

tickets
 

I have about 10 deaf athletes ticket debuts that I would like to send to PSA. They have 50 dollars service fee for couple of weeks turnout. I felt that 50 is a lot for some of common tickets but they mean the world to me.

Do you guys they will lower the rate on tickets down in road?

Most definitely. If they don't get overwhelmed at $50.

I guess for myself I’ve never seen the value in getting them graded. When I began collecting and working in shops before owning one. Grading cards was the best part of the hobby. Learning from other critics and them learning from myself. The eye, the tools and techniques. It was important to the buyer and the seller. Now some ghost slaps a golden number on a case with a seal and everyone’s stuck with an interpretation that many times I feel is flawed. One time I picked up a Dr J rookie and called a friend who was a graders grader. I told him I’ve got something and I’ve got a notebook with a letter and I’m on my way over in an hour. He looked it over for 30 minutes or more. He said what’s your letter lol I told him if it’s the same as yours your buying me lunch. His was a M and mine was a W. Possibly the nicest on the planet. I believe it went to a very happy man in Colorado. Now it’s a number from some ghost. Maybe that’s best if you’re buying or selling. It’s just no fun and little discussion.

PSA allocation, take #2
 

For whatever it's worth, I did end up getting an allocation today at the PSA virtual ""event". I started at 3096 and it got all the way down to me after about 35 minutes.

They definitely awarded more than last time. I wonder if they are feeling more comfortable with where they are in terms of being able to crank them out in 90 days, or whether it was b/c this is the last one for now, or what.

I realize many of you could care less! But thought I would report in case people care and fully accept all arguments that I am dumb for paying $50 for economy grading. I'll report about whether it got turned around in 90 days.

Jeff

$50 per card is entirely too much. I feel as though the hobby has abandoned me.

I agree. At that price is it taking all or most of the profit out of selling the cards you can submit at that price range? It is definitely too high just to slab your cards to protect them.