Yet Another Grading Issue

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Posted By: Corey R. Shanus

I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm simply responding to the question you posed. With this issue, as with so many others that involve questionable behavior by auction houses, people legitimately complain yet in the end almost always nothing changes. One proven way to get a business to change its practices is to create negative economic consequences for adhering to the status quo. Exposure and negative publicity with resultant decline in realized prices will presumably cause profit-maximizing auction houses to at that point do a better job of grading raw cards.

In regard to the puffery point, on this one we'll just agree to disagree. As you know, memorabilia is what I collect. Taken literally the catalogue descriptions on most items of memorabilia would cause prospective bidders to materially overvalue the item. To a person who collects, say, photographs, having an auction house describe a photo with mediocre photo contrast or presentation as having great visual appeal is akin to describing a vg card as ex-mt. It goes on all the time and just as with cards, there is no reason why the descriptions cannot be more accurate. As with you, my eyes glaze when I read the catalogue description, and that glazing doesn't stop when the item I'm reading about is a raw card as opposed to a photograph.