My soon-to-be eight year old son is into football. By extension, he’s into football cards. Many of the kids at his school are as well. This is cool, as I remember fondly the days of my youth when my friends and I traded cards and saved allowance money to go down to the mini-mart and buy cards for 25 cents a pack of 15 or $1 for those long plastic multi-packs with like 100 cards in them. Those days are apparently LONG gone.
My son wanted some more cards over the weekend. No problem. I figure we’ll go down to Meijer and pick up a box with some packs in it as I always see them for sale on the endcaps in the toy aisle. We get there and I’m shocked! Holy shit are they expensive! My choices were a “box” of 10 packs with 5 cards in each pack, or a “box” of 24 packs with 3 cards in each pack, plus the promise of “rookie” Reggie Bush and Matt Lineart cards inserted into the box. Nevermind the fact that each so called box was big enough to hold 50+ packs of cards or the fact that someone can legally get away with calling 3 cards wrapped in foil a pack, the prices on these boxes were $20 and $13 respectively. I went with the 24 pack (72 card total) box for $13 rather than spend $20 on 50 cards. When we get home we discover that the cards in the box are COLLEGE cards, not NFL, despite there being no description of them as being such anywhere on the outside of the box, even in the small, small print (the same print which explains that the packs are “repackaged” by the distributor, meaning in essense that anything valuable has been pre-removed for your convenience).
Turns out my son wasn’t at all dissapointed, as he now has cards from several players he knows and likes to watch (Matt Lineart, Reggie Bush, Vince Young, Jay Cutler, etc.) that show them in college uniforms with their college stats, which he thinks is cool and unique, so in the end it was cool. But honestly I was more than a little ticked off that they could get away with selling college cards in a blatant attempt to pass them off as NFL cards, even touting “rookie” cards in the set.
SO I went online to see if I could find some packs of actual Topps/Upper Deck/Donruss/Fleer/Whomever NFL Football Cards. What…the…hell? So called BOXES of cards come with as few as 5 packs to a box, 4 cards to a pack for a total of 20 cards? Some are a little better, at 8 or even 10 packs to a box, with 5-11 cards per pack. The prices are insane though. $1 a card is not unusual. It looks like some sets may be priced lower, with boxes of 40-50 cards selling for $20 (so $.40-$.50 a card), but there seems to be no reasoning behind it. Every box touts special insert cards that could have autographs or game worn jersey pieces, but the odds of getting one are so low that you’d need to buy 500 cards (25 boxes) to even have a chance at seeing one.
What is the deal with this hobby? Why so expensive? Why are they pricing kids out of it? Am I just missing the “standard” edition football card sets somewhere that are meant to be purchased and collected by 7-12 year old kids? How can parents hope to afford this? I don’t want my son going to school with a binder full of $1+ cards…he could be carrying around $250 worth of stuff at eight years old, that’s insane!
Anyone with a little insight into the hobby care to advise me on how my son can collect football cards without me going broke in the process? He doesn’t care about value, only about having cards of his favorite players.