Posted By:
William HeitmanI am very reluctantly weighing in on this thread once again. Rick's posting which refers to "old timers" as gators and/or dinosauers is just too insulting. It also demonstrates too much ignorance to ignore.
Grading services began to appear in this hobby without any demand from collectors. I am also a coin collector and watched that hobby become the province of people who knew nothing of coins but had money to throw around. Card grading services came from these very same people. It was a very small number of dealers(many of whom had close ties to coin grading companies) who brought it about. They thought that they could profit by slabbing cards in the same fashion as coins. How? It would bring the investors in. That, by the way, is why a card that everyone knew was trimmed actually got graded.
The eBaying of America has now seemed to legitimize the card grading services. WHOA!!!!! An M116 slabbed as a T206? This is hardly an argument in favor of just plain honesty in collecting. I believe that a third party grading service would be wonderful for this hobby if it really was a knowledgeable service. The grading services out there have proven themselves to be unreliable so far, and this was the very objection we dinosaurs had of them when they first popped up. The people who ran them, and participated with them, were not card collecting people--they were people who knew nothing about cards and card collecting, but they were people who saw a buck and went after it.
And just like the "dumbing of America", we've seen a dumbing of card collecting. I think population reports are wonderful, but why would you think that a population report of just the cards submitted for grading is adequate? In other words, is slabbing cards the only way to learn? Do you really want to rely on a bunch of people who don't know an M116 from a T206? Is that what collecting is to you? Have these people who were trying to sell you that crap actually succeeded?
I am very mindful that things have changed and probably changed forever. As electing George W. Bush proved, they haven't necessarily changed for the better. And it also doesn't mean that we can't change them for the better. The few grading services out there have proven to be great for investors and, so far, just awful for COLLECTORS. One small example--Jackson, New Orleans has been on the T210 checklist for at least 45 years--but the hobby only seems to have noticed it when one was submitted for grading. You guys are starting to believe what the grading services want you to believe. And that is that they are the sole source of knowledge and truth in this hobby and that it all began with them. We dinosaurs will attest that the grading services, as they are run today, were a product of profit motive and not card collecting. GOOD NIGHT . . . and . . . GOOD LUCK