Has Anyone Ever Acquired an Entire Inventory from a Baseball Card Store/Stand?

[WhenItWasAHobby]

In the mid-1990's I was involved in the Houston Sports Collectors Association. One of the things we did is take donations of cards and give them to kids who were in the hospital - mainly terminally ill children.

I'll never forget that one day one of the members received a call from a dealer who heard about our program and said that he was closing his shop and would like to donate his entire inventory which was easily 100 - 5K count boxes of modern cards and would even deliver it to us in a U-Haul. So the next Saturday we showed up at this member's house to help unload the cards so that we could store it in his garage and the boxes easily filled up one the stalls in the two car garage.

After we were done, this dealer asks us for a receipt so that he could write this off from his taxes. As it turned out, one of our members there was a CPA and told him this organization is not 501(c) exempt and we couldn't give him anything in writing stating that this was a tax-deductable donation. This dealer was now absolutely livid and the only thing we could do is offer to load them back in his truck. He didn't want any part of that and then even offered to pay whatever it would take to make our organization 501(c) exempt. Finally someone spoke up and asked the dealer how much of a tax write off he was planning to declare and his answer was something ridiculous like $50,000. The CPA once again spoke up and advised the club officers not to have any part of this.

Then at one point as a means of resolving the matter, one of the members asked the dealer if he could just buy the cards for himself. The dealer responded that he'd take $5,000 in cash. The collector haggled him down to something like $500 and the dealer finally agreed and then the collector got cold feet and wouldn't even pay that.

After about an hour this dealer just left in disgust. As it turned out, the local hospitals didn't even want more than 3 or 4 boxes each and it took about 2 years before they were finally depleted from my friend's garage after spending all kinds of time and energy finding charities that would take them.

My advice is to avoid that stuff like a plague.