Quote:
Originally Posted by chadeast
Hey Adam. It's hard to tell with everything having gone up so much this past year. But I believe that the long term effect here is actually to kill off graded set collecting. I've been waiting so long to submit my '33 Goudey commons at a reasonable grading fee that I'm pretty much over it now. I started a new set and decided to collect them ungraded, the first time I've done so in a long time. I also think that when this current boom ends, and it will end, that the TPGs may wish they had the graded set collectors back. It must have been a not insignificant portion of their income pre-COVID. By most accounts, younger collectors are generally not set collectors anyway, but removing the ability to grade commons for 1 year+ is going to drive many of us existing graded set collectors away from that area of interest, as it has me.
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+1
It will definitely have an impact on low-end graded cards that were graded way in the past at much cheaper fees. For someone to go out and acquire a raw card today, and then pay the higher grading fees asked for now (and likely continuing into the future), that grading fee figures into the overall cost. If a seller who had that same card already graded from years earlier at a nominal grading fee goes to sell it today, they'd be foolish not to bump up the asking price to cover the increase in grading fee cost knowing the grading fee is part of what they are actually selling now.
It does seem that this would make people who are into the set registry less likely to continue going forward because of the added costs and delays of getting all the common cards they need to complete registry sets graded as well. But maybe that is part of the plan all along. The recent temporary stop in taking new submissions and increased grading fees was done to curb the excessive amount of work and backlog the TPG was dealing with. This may help the workflow for them going forward, while still allowing the TPG to continue grading the more valuable, higher end cards, at much higher grading fees. So it ends up being a win-win for the TPG, they do less work, but charge more for it.