World Wide Gum Cards
 

Please excuse me if this issue has been addressed here before, but I have never understood the reason why the values of WWG cards seem to be so depressed relative to Goudeys. They are far scarcer than their Goudey counterparts, but look identical. Some may cite the notion that American collectors don't like French printed on the backs, but what about those with only English? For example, the English-only version of Babe Ruth, card #93, is under 100 on the PSA population report. So it has scarcity going for it, along with the baseball G.O.A.T. on a great looking card, but still seems to undersell the Goudey Ruth cards, all four of which have PSA populations of well over 1,000 each.

Any thoughts about this?

Lower supply does not equate to greater demand. In this case, 33 Goudey is one of the very top classic sets in the hobby, right up there with T206 and Cracker Jack, and the hobby is just going to value it relatively more than its Canadian counterpart. That said, I suspect the gap has closed somewhat over time. WWG used to be really cheap, not any more.

Because two people got in a room and said so. The sheep followed

Was Peter one of them ?

I was one of the sheep.

All things being equal, I’d rather have a WWG than a Goudey. But I don’t want to pay Goudey prices for the reason you’ve pinpointed: if I need to sell for whatever reason, the market for my WWG will be smaller than the market for a similar-looking Goudey.

Because for most card series, Canadian issues are less valuable than their US counterparts.

One of my favorite cards in my collection. It cost me $515 at the time of purchase, which was probably about half of the Goudey cost at the time:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...1608f2c0_z.jpg

Five hundred bucks! Dang . . . that had to be quite some time ago.

Really??? I have never heard that before. In fact, I can think of a counter-example: OPC cards. Don't vintage OPC cards hold their own very well versus Topps?

The OPC Gretzky is much pricier than the Topps. Again, I think it's because 33 Goudey is such an iconic set, hobby top 3 or so.

Looks like PSA lists 72 of the yellow and SGC has graded 34. Even if they were all unique that's surprisingly low population.

Again, some do. But most do not.

Just a few things I wanna' point out here:

- According to my research, World Wide Gum Co. and Goudey were the same company. We can't treat them like two separate entities. In other words, this was not like a Topps / O-Pee-Chee kinda' relationship.

- Like Peter said, the price gap has been closing over the years. The reason for this is obvious: people got priced-out of the Goudey market and started looking for cheaper alternatives.

- I don't think that Americans are bothered by the French backs. Joe DiMaggio's two best cards (36' WWG and 37' O-Pee-Chee) are CDN issues with French backs.