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Originally Posted by ullmandds
This is a great point...what "expertise" does PSA even offer to justify the prices their graded cards command? Not much from what I see. Perhaps 60 minutes or halls of shame should investigate this!
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All that the vast majority of collectors care about is did their card get the grade they were after, does this high-grade card that they just spent a lot of money on "fit" the grade it was assigned once in-hand, was their auto deemed authentic, etc. etc. This is because (in PSA's example...) despite the boner with the first card they ever graded (the Wagner) - they ARE recognized as an industry leader and something that you can more or less hang your hat on. I'm just as guilty as the rest of you, I sleep way better at night knowing that whatever card is on it's way to me from eBay land was graded PSA X and there is a high chance it will be a good fit in my collection, that I didn't overspend on it, and not something with a hidden crease, hard to detect doctoring, or some other undisclosed flaw. But you are right, nobody ever asks the question who is doing the grading, what is their training and experience? Is it sports collectables experts who know a lot about cards and the common types of altering and damage? Or some college kids on summer vacation who can be shown a basic scale and be more or less "trained" to do the job in a day or so? Don't misread - I don't think it HAS to be someone with a Ph.D. in paper conservancey, or someone who knew the precise patterns of how paper cutters worked in the American Tobacco factories in Virginia at the turn of the last century. But it is true that at least on some level - starting in the early days of PSA and continuing up until now - they bill themselves as "experts" and generally get by with that without incurring much scrutiny. Today, someone like David Hall or Joe Orlando can look at you with as straight face and say, "Well, we are the experts becacuse we have graded 90 zillion cards since 1996..." That may be true. But they also make plenty of mistakes and nobody seems to care - why, what made you guys "experts" when you had not yet graded a single card? It's a fair question. Collectors Universe I believe came later; Mr. Hall had been in the business of grading coins. Now suddenly they are experts in 100 year old pieces of cardboard? Ok, there may be stranger things in the world - but the point is that nobody asks the question.
A random aside that doesn't really fit in anywhere else - what has always intrigued me is comic book grading. How do you become an expert at THAT? In theory it's similar to cards, but man how many pages are in one comic book? If you take some of the hysteria / extreme measures that are starting to be applied to sports card grading, how long would it take to do that with an entire comic book? Um, we'll have this back to you next year. Wait...is PSA already in this business? ;-)