Unpopular opinion on VCP an other "comp apps"

[Rich Klein]

Originally Posted by maniac_73

I’ve always been curious about how Beckett came up with card prices back in the '90s. It seemed like a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, dealers were using Beckett to set their prices, but Beckett claimed to base their prices on what dealers were charging. So where did the original pricing data actually come from?

As I noted, we spent a LOT of $$$ traveling the country pre-EBay days and a good bit even after EBay really got going circa 1998 so we got prices from sales lists, from seeing what people were asking/selling at shows and stores and as I noted with phone conversations with trusted hobby sources. We knew who would tell us the truth and who would, as the expression goes, blow smoke.

Were we checking on a price of a Sandy Alomar Jr. card from 1997 Topps, well not really unless we knew he might be catching fire. But we wanted to make sure we knew what the best cards and the best players were selling for. That got more important as inserts/autos/relics/parallels took over. But we did want to know which players were very popular. A good clue back in the day was there were always collectors for Mike Mussina and Cris Carter tougher cards as they had a group of collectors. Not all semi-stars were really the same and we tried to differentiate in cases such as that.

I can tell you when I went on show/store trips to an area I did not know I would ask someone (s) I knew to tell who the market makers were and how much I could trust them. You'd be amazed as how truthful some people were on that level. Plus, in the then burgeoning NY/NJ market I knew from before I went to work at Beckett the major dealers and they were very forthright with me

And we had a team of price guide people (18 at the peak) who were similar to me in gathering prices and helping to create the price guide (s)

Regards
Rich