PSA Appraisal Values

[Snowman]

One approach is to submit the cards at a much lower tier than you know they are worth and wait for the inevitable upcharge email. If they crucify your EX-MT card by sticking it in a PSA 1 holder, then tell you they are going to upcharge you, you can tell them to go pound sand. If the card comes back as "altered" (when you know it in fact has not been), then you don't waste a zillion dollars in grading fees after the recent high school graduate with 17 days of grading experience deems it to have been kept in a screw-down holder (which it was not).

Honestly, I'm absolutely baffled by the level of hubris that PSA puts on full display today. There are very few companies out there with worse customer service. I recognize that it surely gets old hearing from a million+ submitters that their cards are "undergraded". I get it for all those bulk and value submissions, but when we're paying $600 for "walk-through" or $1000+ for "premium" service, we should be able to get some actual f**cking customer service. I'm really getting sick of sending in VG to VG-EX cards with no creases and really strong eye-appeal and having them come back to me in PSA 1 holders because some completely incompentent noobie grader had never seen a vintage card prior to last month's training course. Then I crack them out after paying some ridiculous fee and send them off to SGC where they get fair and accurate grades every time. It's not that difficult to grade cards accurately. It's really not.

It'd be one thing if they were off by a half point, or if the card was pretty borderline and it's off by a full grade. But there should never be a situation where a card is off by 2 full grades, let alone 3 or more. But this is precisely what's happening right now at PSA. Not with every submission obviously, there are still some good experienced graders there, and if you happen to get one that day, lucky you. But it has become clear that they are now wildly inconsistent. But we still pay as though they are not. In any other industry, the customer could get their money back when the service they paid for was not provided. We pay for fair and accurate grades. I can't help but think we're going to be seeing a huge class-action lawsuit in the not-too-distant future regarding them not providing the service we paid for. And it wouldn't be a difficult task to prove. "See this PSA 2? See this PSA 5? Same card, but I had to pay for the grading fees twice to get a fair and accurate grade on it." Again, I'm not talking about a 4 that maybe should have been a 5. I'm talking about VG+ cards in PSA 1 holders. It's getting absurd. They need to get their $#!+ together.