Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoPoto
Sorry, I didn't mean to infringe on your intellectual property rights, he said good-naturedly. But isn't it the case that PSA was buried under an avalanche of "circulated" current-year cards that were sold by Topps (et al) to "specialists", who immediately and with as little handling as possible submitted them to PSA for grading in anticipation of selling them as soon as they were returned as PSA 10s? Unless I'm wrong about that, it seems like common sense (and basic free-market capitalism) for Fanatics to address the tsunami of demand for PSA 10 (which is essentially a euphemism for uncirculated) current-year cards directly.
|
But a big (huge?) factor in the tsunami of demand for PSA 10s is that not every, or anywhere near every, uncirculated card gets a 10. PSA goes to great (ridiculous, arbitrary) lengths to create artificial scarcity of 10s by "finding" undetectable flaws that result in a 9 or an 8.
Shipping out pre-slabbed "uncirculated" cards in any robust number would kill the (arbitrary, perceived) scarcity, which is the real source of the demand, not the condition itself. On the other hand, if they ship out few enough pre-slabbed for them to be scarce, it probably wouldn't be very profitable. If they tried to charge too much, people would just buy the regular version and hope to get the blessing of the PSA wizard. Or I guess they could do a very limited-edition release of a pre-slabbed card that isn't replicated in a non-slabbed version, but there the slabbing would be only a minor selling point above and beyond the scarcity of the card itself.