In my city, there’s really only 2 stores, which are the same with 2 locations, that provide a decent selection of vintage pokemon singles. Despite this and how much I buy cards, I never buy any cards from them. They don’t show any prices for any of these so you have to get an employee to take whichever cards you want out of the case and look up each individual card price, a painstakingly awkward experience. Then you just get card prices all 50 to 100% more expensive than what the card in that condition would usually sell for on ebay. Now obviously they can charge what they want for cards so I choose not to buy expensive singles from them but what about older common cards.
I can’look through their cards and choose what commons/uncommons I need to complete older sets and avoid shipping costs, a win win. The issue with this is they simply refuse to allow me to look through their bulk cards. I asked 2 years ago when I would be able to and they said they’d have them sorted in a few months. I returned 6 months or so later and got the same answer. Just went the other day and there doesn’t seem to be any plan to allow this. I get not allowing it during covid but I dont think it’ll ever be or ever was going to be an option. So I’m told I should just bring in a list of cards and they’ll have an employee find them and give me a price. I ask what they use for their pricing because if its ebay sold listing, a common card wont get sold for less than a dollar because it’s not worth it and I don’t want every single card to be charged a dollar or more when I can get it for 30 cents on tcg player and they’ve heavily marked up the expensive singles so I just want to know what they use to price cards. The employee responds, and I quote “Some people are happy to pay 400% the cards price to get the card they want.” What the Fuck. Not to mention he completely avoids the question for what they use to price their cards. I feel their entire business model is selling to newbies coming into the hobby that don’t know they’re getting ripped off.
This added with their poor anti consumer business model makes it perhaps the worst place to shop for anything. Imagine walking into a walmart and having to ask the price for every single item. And the price changes from day to day or even employee to employee. And they don’t give any reason or source for how they price their items. AND you cant even look through half of what they’re selling, they’ll only let you give them a list of what youre looking for and they’ll tell you if they have it and the price. Not to mention any of their sealed product is marked up 25% the same exact price I could get that same exact item from target right now.
Sorry for the wall of text but I wont feel bad or miss this local game store if it shuts down.
I have a LGS and their prices aren’t great, but they do have some good deals occasionally. Got a 1st edition shadowless bulbasaur for 25 cents and a shadowless charmander for 25 cents, and a D butterfree for $3
@nish I guess a bad lgs is better than no lgs. Only thing they seem to be good for is prereleases
@kingboo64 I can’t even see cards like those. I’m literally asking them to see those so I can buy some and they wont let me because they ‘arent sorted’. Does your lgs have stickers or things showing the price of the card or do you have to ask an employee to look it up?
I have to bring a list to my LGS of the cards I’m interested in. I wait a few minutes and they will bring what they’ve got to show me. In my few visits they’ve all been heavy play wotc cards and they say they don’t have 1st edition stuff. They do not have prices on anything and always check tcgplayer for pricing on the spot.
Once in a while, my local LGS will have some decent cards that are decently priced. I usually go every few months and will almost always walk out of the store with a few nice finds.
But for the most part, they severely overprice a lot of played condition cards. It just seems like they look at the value of what the card would be in NM condition and then slap that price on it regardless of what the condition actually is. This is probably the case for most LGS.
They have also packed up all of their bulk and don’t even sell it anymore, which is a shame. They used to always have a few binders with bulk cards and would also have little plastic boxes full of decent stuff (I found a ton of Shadowless cards and even some 1st Edition Base stuff there a while back). Now, their bulk is nowhere to be seen.
Your store is certainly a special case, though. That customer service sounds pretty putrid.
I shared this story before but I’ll re-share here:
There are a few LGS in my city. I picked the one that was the closest to where I live and stopped in on a Saturday afternoon. The first thing I noticed was the extreme stench of body odor. There were about 15 guys clustered around a TV playing S.S.B. I did my best to ignore the smell and walked around the shop. 99.9% of the displayed product was MTG. In the 5-10 minutes I was browsing, it became clear I wasn’t going to find anything I was looking for. On top of it, I had no idea if anyone was an employee as no one approached me the entire time I was in there.
Some of the other LGS in this city are better. They usually only have crazy mark-ups on modern product or poor condition vintage priced at NM/Mint prices
Yah I have been to a LGS that looks up ebay prices on every single card. Just throw all your common and uncommon cards in a $0.50 box and be done with it. I don’t want to stand here while you look up 20 different common cards worth a few cents each just to tell me each one will cost about $5. This store also hasn’t gotten any new single cards (besides the newest set) since I found them maybe 4 years ago. The same store made a giant post on facebook about supporting local businesses. I can’t feel bad for a shop that is loosing business when their business practices are terrible.
I avoid any store that doesn’t have their products already priced out like the plague. If you are going to charge ebay prices why would I spend time and gas money driving to your store to take a look at your stock when I have no clue what cards you do and don’t have.
A different store has prices on EVERYTHING, so they get my business. And they obviously have a high turn over rate, they have new stuff every time I go.
On any cards worth over $10+ I am completely fine with my LGS not having them priced because in reality those prices change on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Its not fair to crucify them for protecting themselves from being blatantly ripped off on a high value item and/or wasting countless resources/time on constantly updating prices. Granted, my LGS has a display case of 100+ pokemon cards so this doesnt hold true for shops with only a handful of cards.
For example a raw NM base set charizard went from being a sub $100 card to a $700+ card over a very short period of time. Also, I dont think its reasonable/fair to expect lower prices than ebay on raw cards just because its a brick and mortar store.
I think I mentioned this on Discord once but here’s a story from a few weeks ago.
I was with some friends about a half hour south of where we live and we were trying to think of things to do. I thought we should go find a card/hobby shop (kinda selfishly but they’re also mildly into collectible things so they agreed). The closest one I found was another half hour south so I’d never been there before. The place seemed pretty proud to announce that they carried sports cards and Pokémon. When we got there we were greeted by an older guy (like 50s). The whole display case was filled with graded baseball cards and I thought I was going to look through a good selection of Pokémon cards. I asked him about it and he said they only did modern cards because “the original cards were printed too much and were worthless. The modern sets are much more limited and hold their value better”. The guy tried to tell me that Base Set Charizard is worthless and that he had a large stack of them that they gave out for free during the most recent pre-virus prerelease event. He said that people are scamming people into buying Base Charizards in PSA 10 for $1000 online. He was kinda… chauvinistic? so I didn’t want to argue back too much because it would be a waste of time but I said something about knowing which cards have the more limited and exclusive releases can help you find valuable ones and he replied “yeah, like Dark Charizard. That’s the Charizard to get.” I literally have no idea how you even come to these conclusions. Like who told him any of this?
Since there was nothing pre-Sun and Moon I bought 4 of the cheapest booster packs from his open Sword and Shield box (support small business I guess?) and ended up getting 3 V cards (one each for me and my loser friends I was with ‘_>’ ) which will probably bone the next few kids who buy packs from there but whatever he chose them for me. On the hour drive home even my friends who were looking at other things and not really into Pokémon were like wtf was that dude even talking about. It was an interesting experience and not one I’ll ever drive down for again lol. Hopefully I can find some better shops nearby because I want to go to one for real.
I will admit though the baseball card collection they had there was pretty insane.
Exactly. Business these days are doing anything to get people and buy. “Buy this only 4.99!” I’m doing them a favor giving them my business and they make it as hard as possible. It’s mainly there lack of trying to caring whatsoever that ticks me off.
As I said, I understand not having prices for more expensive cards but they don’t even say what the pricing method is, and it varies from employee to employee. Which is especially important for bulk cards. And again as I said, they significantly mark up all card prices, as in I can get the same exact card same condition on ebay for up to half of the price they’ll give me. Their NM primal grouden ex full art? 60 bucks. I have no idea where they got that 60 dollar price tag when I asked the employee the price so any answer about what they used would be helpful. Obviously I don’t expect them to sell below ebay prices or even on par, but these prices are ridiculous. Also the employees seem annoyed every time I ask for prices and makes it all the more awkward.
I 100% agree with you and feel the same way about the vast majority of shops I’ve been to when it comes to pricing cards though. $60 for that Groudon is absurd and I feel like every played conditon WoTC holo is at least $75 and if you ask why they’ll tell you its the price on TCGplayer/TrollNToad. All while making you feel like an asshole lol
My lgs has 3 big boxes full of Pokémon cards and you used to be able to go in there and pick what you wanted. I once got over $30 worth of singles for less than $5. They sadly are not doing that right now but they will in a few weeks. Price wide they have stickers on the sleeves for the cards over $2
My LGS recently stopped selling vintage. I never bought anything because at the time their prices weren’t very competitive compared to T&T. I still occasionally get modern sealed product from them and while they’re more expensive you’d only save probably 5$ buying online and I live somewhat rural so we don’t have a big box store like walmart or target. It’s a university town so that’s why a LGS can exist while a walmart could not.
They now sale 100 card bulk for 4$. The guy showed a stack with 8 RH so I bought a brick and it only had 1 RH which was disappointing… 99% of my purchases are online though, but it’s nice to be able go into a store and browse product/cards and see what you’re getting up front. I miss living in East Asia when I could browse 10,000s of cards at LGS and everything had a price for the most part.