Like many other card shops across the country, my local card shop had sprung up in the 1990s to capitalize on the demands of a growing hobby. To increase profit margins with this cardboard craze, trading card companies began releasing hobby-only versions of products, distinguished from retail products by exclusivity—they couldn’t be found at the local drugstore or K-Mart—and named accordingly as luxury brands. With these hobby products, the card companies followed a simple economic calculus: a higher price tag meant more favorable probabilities on the foil wrappers, as well as exclusive, “hobby-only” cards. The mark-ups were lucrative. By the time I had started collecting in the early 2000s, hobby products were already reaching unconscionable prices ($100 for a sealed box of sports cards was a common sight). But 2003 saw the release of a new tier of product: Upper Deck’s Exquisite Collection. Replacing the foil wrappers, each etched wooden box housed just five cards and retailed for $500. Exquisite Collection was seemingly a reductio ad absurdum of manufactured scarcity. Each card on the checklist was individually serial numbered to no more than 225 copies. The basketball card release built on an already exciting year for the hobby, the rookie season of budding phenom LeBron James. The product sold like wildfire. Fifteen years later, an unopened box would sell for $43,200 at auction.
Today, the situation is, astonishingly, even worse. The $5,000 padlocked metal suitcases of Panini Flawless have replaced the $500 wooden boxes of Upper Deck Exquisite. A secondary industry of live-streamed “box breaks” has cropped up, enticing collectors to bid on the right to receive all cards of a specific team or player in a box opened via livestream by professional “breakers,” viewed on Twitch with masturbatory anticipation. Opportunistic middlemen waited for hours in lines at Target during COVID in order to clear the shelves of boxes and packs ostensibly intended for children. Card grading companies are backlogged by months due to the paucity of staff trained to numerically evaluate card condition, including corner sharpness and centering. Condition is so critical that card companies have started releasing cards that are already encased in thick plastic holders in boxes. (...)
The sheer complexity emerging from the marketization of the sports card hobby begs a simple question: what happened to the days of baseball cards in shoeboxes or dime-store wax packs with slabs of bubble gum? And what does this tell us about nostalgia?
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The history of trading cards is a 140 year history of targeted marketing to children. Though “trade” cards were packaged with tobacco products throughout much of the 19th century as a form of advertising promotion, the 1880s saw the first collecting craze in the United States. Tobacco companies such as Allen & Ginter and W. Duke, Sons & Co. produced cards depicting actresses, athletes, tropical birds, race horses, coat of arms, flags of nations, Native Americans, and generals of the Civil War with the explicit intent of enticing children either to purchase tobacco products themselves or harass their parents into doing so. As described by Dave Jamieson in Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession:“The cigarette ‘would lie down and die tomorrow’ if it weren’t for the high volume of sales to ‘small boys,’ one tobacco man told the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1888 … [S]ome tobacco salesmen grew convinced that the pictures were instrumental in turning a generation of city boys into cigarette ‘fiends’ in the 1880s. One dealer told the Tribune that, ‘It would do away with half this boys’ trade, I think, if there was a law prohibiting the giving away of pictures in packages of cigarettes.’ Politicians in several cities around the country tried to put just such laws on the books. Charleston, South Carolina, effected an ordinance in 1887 prohibiting the sale of cigarettes with baseball cards.”The cards were an exploitative marketing tool intended to grow brand loyalty, printed by the tens of millions. (...)
Though people often associate baseball cards with bubblegum, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the two were sold together, an innovation widely credited to the Goudey Gum Company.
by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: C.M. Duffy
