Byline: Jimmie Tramel
Jul. 31--The house of cards -- sports cards, that is -- came tumbling down. It used to be that you couldn't drive a city block without spotting a card store. In 1991, there were 30 Tulsa-area sports card and sports memorabilia stores listed in the Yellow Pages. Now there are eight card store listings, proving that contraction isn't just a term relative to Major League Baseball. What happened? The trading card version of the stock market crash happened. 'I would say the baseball card crash was more devastating because the economy, it came back around,' said Terry Remy, owner of a Claremore card shop.
'Cards probably aren't going to come back around. I would bet the farm on it.' The name of Remy's shop is First Place Video Store and Game Exchange. If that sounds like an odd name for a card store, it's because Remy learned his store had to evolve in order to survive. He estimates only 10 percent of his business comes from cards. 'If it weren't for the games and movies, I would be long gone,' he said. The card store implosion wasn't just local. Industry analyst Scott Kelnhofer, editor of Card Trade magazine, estimates that there were about 8,000 U.S. card shops in 1990. By 1995, the number declined to about 5,500. He estimated that 1,200 traditional hobby stores remain, not including mass-market retailers like Wal-Mart or convenience stores that sell packs of cards. Surviving stores don't need sympathy. They need the industry to shake a slump of Gil Hodges (0-for-21 in the 1952 World Series) proportions. Approximately $1.1 billion worth of new licensed sports cards were sold in 1992, according to a Sports Collector Digest estimate. Sales of new cards have declined every year since, dropping to $250 million in 2005. 'Those numbers don't surprise me,' card collector and Tulsa-based accountant Dean Majors said. 'The mid-'80s to early '90s were just unrealistic spending by everyone, including me. There have been real estate bubbles, tech stock bubbles and there was without a doubt a sports card bubble.
'Fed chairman Alan Greenspan called the spending on the tech stocks 'irrational exuberance' in the mid-'90s when that bubble was at full power. The sports card market needed an Alan Greenspan in 1990. It's been a steady fall back to reality since then,' Majors said. The boom years are remembered fondly by retailers. In a 1986 interview with the Tulsa World, George Moore of Tulsa's Baseball Card Store said the shop he and Bill Weeks owned was on course to gross $150,000 that year. Business was so good that they opened a second store and Weeks said the most the stores ever grossed was probably $400,000.
The location of the original store was 5142 S. Peoria Ave. It used to be that you could go there to search for a Sal (The Barber) Maglie card. Go to that address now and you can ask for a haircut at Brook Plaza Barber and Hairstyling. Both stores owned by Moore and Weeks are long gone. BOOM TO BUST Once upon a time, card shops sprang up like weeds. Every day seemed to bring a new store on the landscape. Just as suddenly, card shops began hemorrhaging customers. And when customers vanished, so did shops, sometimes without much notice.
Before Remy opened his shop, he sold cards on a consignment basis at a Tulsa store. Remy said things were great until checks from the store owner started bouncing. 'A month later, I drove by his store and it was locked up,' Remy said. Why did so many shops follow suit? Take your pick. -- Once upon a time, there were a limited number of card companies and a finite number of cards produced. Hobbyists enjoyed trying to complete sets. Then multiple card companies saturated the market, making it impossible to collect 'em all. 'They just cut their own throats basically,' Remy said. 'The main thing that happened is it was just greed. The companies got greedy. They thought if they make a trillion cards, they will make five trillion dollars. It just doesn't work that way.' -- The Internet. Why own a card store when you can sell cards on eBay? 'Competition from online sources made it hard for stores because online sellers don't have the overhead costs of a brick-and-mortar facility, so they can often charge less than a store can,' Kelnhofer said in an e-mail to the Tulsa World. 'Plus, many online sellers are just collectors looking to sell off items for whatever they can get for them -- in other words, they have no wholesale costs to cover.' -- The strike. Some believe Major League Baseball's work stoppage knocked the air out of card sales, although the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run derby provided a bit of resuscitation. -- Children were priced out of the hobby. It's one thing for a parent to give a kid a quarter or two for a pack of cards and a powdery slab of gum. It's a little more difficult to hand over a fistful of dollars for a new pack of cards. 'I love opening packs, even Topps $2 packs,' collector Robert Taylor said. 'But you just get 10 cards for $2. When I was a kid, two bucks would buy eight packs and you would get 15 or 16 cards a pack.' Also, younger generations don't seem to be as enthralled with collecting. They have recreational options -- video games, the Internet -- that weren't available to previous generations. -- Investor invasion. The card industry got bloated during boom years because too many people began buying cards for the wrong reasons. Amateur alchemists hoarded cards and wanted to transmute them into gold. '(Card collecting) started out with a bunch of hobbyists,' Weeks said. 'When the speculators got in it, it got really bad. There were people who didn't know anything about baseball.'
After speculators and disillusioned collectors bailed out, only hardcore hobbyists remained. When Remy sold only cards at his store, he said he went from having 60 customers per day to five customers per day.
'When I first started out, it was like everybody had three cats and three rats and everybody was happy, except the rats, of course,' he said. 'But then it got to the point where it was three cats and one rat. It just got to the point where the strong survived. And I wasn't one of the strong card shops, so I diversified. I started selling games and movies. The best thing that ever happened to me was that.' ON DECK A 28-year-old card collector -- he wants to go by the alias of W.U. -- became so disgruntled with the hobby that he started a Web site called baseballcarddeath.com
Copyright (c) 2006, Tulsa World, Okla.
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