SGC Announcement

[BobbyStrawberry]

I can't figure out why PSA seems incapable of providing accurate turnaround times. Yes, SGC has made a ton of pricing and turnaround time changes in recent years, but at least they are trying to give their customers accurate information...

[raulus]

Originally Posted by BobbyStrawberry

I can't figure out why PSA seems incapable of providing accurate turnaround times. Yes, SGC has made a ton of pricing and turnaround time changes in recent years, but at least they are trying to give their customers accurate information...

I suspect their volume and the haphazard nature of how they process submissions makes it very difficult to estimate with any precision.

You feed raw cards through one end of the factory, and they bounce around inside for a long time, and eventually they magically come out the other end. But in-between, they just seem to languish forever, and the order of processing is highly randomized at each step in the process. One step might fly right on through in 24 hours, while other steps take 2 months.

[53toppscollector]

SGC already graded my 7 card order received on September 12th.

2 days for grading. That is pretty crazy.

[Casey2296]

I'll go one step further, I had a psa account prior to CU buying them, my login didn't work when they had the genius idea to make one login for all their companies, spent weeks with customer service trying to figure why I couldn't log in with my email address, they never could figure it out. NBD, I'm fine not submitting to a fancy company who can't figure out a simple log in issue and usually crossover to SGC anyway.

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by BobbyStrawberry

I can't figure out why PSA seems incapable of providing accurate turnaround times. Yes, SGC has made a ton of pricing and turnaround time changes in recent years, but at least they are trying to give their customers accurate information...

It's a forecasting problem. PSA receives around 25,000 to 50,000 cards per day, with massive amounts of variance from one day to the next, and from one month to the next. SGC recieves around 3,000 cards per day and has lower variance. It is much easier to project turnaround times for a smaller operation like SGC than it would be for one like PSA, simply because of how the math works out.

There are just simply too many things outside of their control that make it difficult to predict future grading demands like product release dates, changes in market values of cards, etc. These all affect grading demand. PSA is effectively guessing at how much demand will be generated by monthly specials and changes to the pricing structure as well. It's a never ending battle of push and pull.

Predicting their future demand with the sort of precision that the hobby wants is nearly impossible. The best they can do is guess, throw a big-ish number out there and hope they don't go over. Then, if they do, they can make adjustments to their pricing, hiring, and monthly specials that help to chip away at that demand. Some levers work more quickly than others. Hiring more talent, or perhaps I should say more "talent", is the one that takes the longest, of course.