Hey guys, I posted a bit about this in the Great Grading Results Thread but after receiving my cards in the mail today… I am more mad than I initially was at PSA.
Backstory: I sent this bulk 13 card submission to PSA back in November of 2017. I received my cards in the mail today. The processing time is not what annoys me. I received my grades last week along with an email stating I will get $30 (declared card value compensation) and an additional $20 in compensation for the processing delay in the form of vouchers.
Here are my grades:
I honestly believe that I deserve expected value compensation for those two cards seeing as they were graded and then damaged in the encapsulation process. They were either (by my guess) PSA 9 or 10 cards. I have reached back out to PSA regarding this but… that’s not all folks!
However upon receiving my cards today I noticed that my Japanese base set Blastoise was damaged very badly as well, which makes me sad because I’m trying to grade a full set of Japanese base set holos. Sigh. He was also pinched during the encapsulation process and has a full bottom ridge sized dent along the bottom edge. Here are pictures of all of the damage:
So why would they not contact me about Blastoise as well?! So many questions… sigh. I guess I’ll have to sit on the phone with them for a while tomorrow to deal with the Blastoise situation as well. This is just so disheartening considering I have another 27 cards with them right now and all I’m worried about is whether they’ll come back damaged. Some of the cards in my other submission are precious to me and arguably very rare and the thought of them being damaged makes me sick.
I’ve never had one damaged and I’ve graded 10s of thousands. What happened to you is really too bad.
I’m sure they’ll refund you for the value you stated yourself on the sub form which I’m sure you accurately estimated.
Thats a shame, hope you get refunded the amount you put in the form. I’ve seen a few pics o cards getting caught in the press whilst encapsulating.
Is PSA hiring minimum wage workers to handle our cards xD?
Now, I’m not super familiar with this type of situation - where it is obvious that these cards were damaged during encapsulation. So, this damage is a direct result of PSA - they are admitting to this fact and accepting fault. That’s all very clear… However, what are you entitled to as compensation?
I was always under the impression that you fill-out the the Submission Form - Declared Value based upon the expected grade. So, if PSA mailed-out your order and the USPS damaged / lost the order, you would get compensated based upon the Declared Value - nothing more, nothing less. Wouldn’t this also apply to damage caused by PSA?
I’m honestly not sure if this is in-fact the case; however, that’s always how I’ve viewed this. Fortunately, I’ve never been in your situation though.
They did refund him the amount he estimated… what he’s saying is he thinks he got a PSA 9 or 10, and wants PSA to reimburse him for the grade he think he got.
Isn’t this all they are responsible for though? The OP said that he was fine with getting $X if the card got lost / damaged by USPS. So, why (or I guess a better question would be, will) PSA have to pay a “premium” over the Declared Value for damage they caused?
And now I have to also worry about getting fair PSA 10 compensation for the Blastoise as well since my declared value for him was simply his raw value. I find it strange that they encapsulated him and not the other two, despite the damage being way worse on the Blastoise.
@oldskoolpokemon I believe I am entitled to the expected value of the card and not the declared value because they were damaged after being graded and PSA is not letting me know what grade I earned. I do not think vouchers make up for the value of the cards seeing as they were already at the encapsulation phase…
I don’t use the estimated grade as a declared value and I’m sure many others don’t either. That doesn’t really make sense to me either because that’s all hypothetical. There can be a difference of $100’s/$1000’s between a 9 & 10. He could’ve declared the value at $200 cuz maybe it would get a 10, so PSA would reimburse that amount then? Idk doesn’t make sense to me to write what grade you think you’ll get when we’re not the ones grading.
“We understand you will not know the True Value of the item until it has been certified, so we ask that you form a realistic, educated guess based on your own research, keeping in mind that the Declared Value is also used for insurance purposes.”
That makes sense to me, but in this case, the declared value shouldn’t matter for Blastoise, right? It is now encapsulated and it has a very real, tangible value at a PSA 10 grade, so I think it’d be up to PSA to adjust accordingly. Kind of like when @fazool received compensation for his card based on what the card would’ve been valued at if it were real, I feel like the Blastoise should receive compensation for being a PSA 10 card, not compensation for a declared raw value.
Here’s a chart that breaks down how PSA usually assigns a value for a damaged item. I’d say this situation (represented in the middle) is quite unprecedented to us here on the forums. In @cinnaminhbun 's case, we know that his cards received a grade, PSA damaged the card during encapsulation, then PSA edited the grade database, deleted the grades that had been assigned, and replaced them with N9 grades. My assumption is that PSA is taking the stance here that ‘haha! the card isn’t in a slab, therefore the PSA financial guarantee doesn’t apply!’. My argument would be that once that card receives a grade from PSA grader is when the financial guarantee should take effect, and the reimbursement value should be the same whether it’s in the slab or not (namely, MarketValueoriginalgrade - MarketValuenewlowergrade).
Definitely a shitty situation, but make sure you keep a cool head when you’re speaking with PSA either on the phone or by email. They hold all the power in this situation, unfortunately, so if you can be level-headed, collected, and put forth a logical argument you’ll have a much better shot at getting an agreeable resolution than you would if you used fire and fury.
So my take on this situation is that the N9 cards should be (and have already been) reimbursed for declared value, as Gary mentions. That’s the whole point for declared value, and even though it’s a bit snakey for PSA to damage the item after they gave it a grade and not reimburse you for market value, since they hadn’t slabbed it yet they can still technically change it to N9 and only be liable for declared value.
The encapsulated PSA blastoise, however, should be notified to PSA of its damaged and be reimbursed for the difference between the actual grade and the given grade prior to damage, as hypernova pointed out.
Let me just start by saying what happened here is a pretty unfortunate situation and it sucks to hear that things like this happen. But unfortunately I’m going to have to side with the PSA on this one. There are many reasons why but here is the main one:
So you’ve kinda made your bed on this one. This is the risk accepted when you under-insure your items.
Im not too sure how the other two cards are but for the cased blastoise I am sure they will do something about it!
Not sure if this will help ease you a little but I did have a card that was mislabeled - sent it back to PSA, got it corrected and sent back to me (I stay in Singapore) for free so I believe they will take mistakes on their part responsibly.
As @pkmnflyingmaster laid it out from their own policy it is literally black and white. You are entitled to no more and possibly even less than the declared value.
Is it shitty of PSA to make this mistake? YES!, but we must understand they are humans. Try putting 1,000,000 cards a year in between two pieces of plastic and you are bound to pinch some. Your cards were some of the unfortunate, inevitable few.
Is it good of them to reach out to you and rectify it? YES! Even though you aren’t happy with the compensation you do not understand how huge of a step this is. They are going exactly by their policy which you agreed to when you sent them the cards for grading. I have never seen a situation like this documented. We have had situations in the past similar to your Blastoise, but never anyone documenting the fact that PSA reached out to them about damage during grading.
What I would have personally liked to see is Acerola and Charizard being regraded and slabbed. Say they were initially 10’s then went to 4’s. You should have been compensated for that IMO, but that is fully up to PSA’s discretion. I definitely feel it is a bit of a cop out on their part especially for relatively low value cards. Luckily though, you will get that treatment for the Blastoise however since they somehow let that through into the case. So you will get 10 value - new grade value which will be nearly worthless.
I mean I have submitted dozens of raw pack fresh charizards that I think have been 10 contenders. Several of them have achieved the 10, yet every submission form I have declared them at ~$100-$200 assuming a 9. If one of those had been pinched and PSA not told me the grade I would feel very robbed only getting the $200. It is unreasonable for anyone in most cases to declare a PSA 10 value and that aids PSA in situations like this. An unfortunate reality in the grading world.
Sigh. He was also pinched during the encapsulation process and has a full bottom ridge sized dent along the bottom edge. Here are pictures of all of the damage:
