Posted By:
Fred CThere is no industry standard therefore there are inconsistencies. What are the guarantees? Do these guarantees really mean that the everyday collector is protected by the grading service? The fiasco regarding a certain "rare" T206, a certain grading company, a certain "big" dealer and a certain "big" collector didn't really inspire much. If you think about it the grading company wouldn't have done much if it were Joe Blow dealer or collector.
There is the story of another collector (board member) that had to take another grading company to court because the grading company really didn't want to bother with the issue and thought it would go away. Well it didn't and the grading company ended up losing in court - the point being that the grading service(s) can tell the little collector to pound sand and most people will because they lack the resources to fight.
It's not like the companies can start over. It's not like they can start offering a service and render all past grades as possible errors. That would put the collecting community in a frenzy because all of a sudden all the cards encapsulated before a certain date would be suspect. I suppose someone could come up with some plan to have the grading companies "redo" all the grades at a nominal fee but that would involve removing many (thousands? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) cards from their holders and potentially damaging them.
Is the grading system broken? Look at it this way, it was never really right to begin with so its hard to break what was already broken. Look at the very first card graded by PSA... need we look further?