A Houston shop got hit with a sledgehammer: about $10,000 in damage and $10,000 to $15,000 in cards gone.
Same week, two guys bricked the door of a Cypress, TX shop that's only been open five months.
In Branson, MO, one guy spent about half an hour in a shop and left with about $10,000 in stuff plus $1,000 cash.
Shop owners there are in a group chat watching for the stolen cards.

What stops a break-in better: alarms and cameras, or pulling the good stuff out of the cases every night?

Source: ICv2

PSA just put grading submissions in 50 Lids stores.
A customer hands their cards to the guy at the hat counter and fills out a form.
Lids packs them, ships them to PSA, and hands them back when they come in.
Most of those stores sit in malls.

Fifty mall counters taking submissions. Does that pull new people into grading, or take the one service your shop still makes money on?

Source: ICv2

PSA turned on a new Standard tier today at $59.99 a card.
Turnaround is 90 to 100 business days and the cap is $1,000 declared value.
The backlog is about 9.9 million cards, back under 10 million.
Value tiers stay paused until that number gets to 5 million.

Would you send a $150 card in at $59.99 and wait four months, or is that card just raw now?

Source: Sports Illustrated

A federal judge hears the antitrust case against PSA's parent this Friday in California.
The suit says PSA, SGC and Beckett together are about 80 percent of card grading.
The collector who sued wants Collectors Holdings forced to sell SGC and Beckett back off.
Collectors wants the case thrown out, or moved to private arbitration.

They say grading got slower and pricier because demand exploded, not because they bought two competitors. Do you buy that?

Source: Value Added Resource

A 1996-97 Fleer Thrill Seekers Jordan in a PSA 8 sold for $13,200 on Sunday.
A PSA 10 of the same card sold for $78,000 in July.
His 1986-87 Fleer in a PSA 10 sold for $408,000 last month.
Card Ladder puts his daily sales volume near $535,000 right now.

With $65,000 riding on the grade, do you submit it or sell it raw and take the sure money?

Source: Bleacher Nation

Four masked guys cleaned out Goldenrod City Collectibles in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin in just over six minutes.
They took at least $340,000, a lot of it graded Pokemon.
Police got there ten seconds after they left.
The Battlegrounds in Dalton, Tennessee lost about $14,000 in One Piece slabs and boxes.
Punch-Out Games in Minnesota lost $30,000 to $50,000 in about a minute and a half.

Are graded slabs sitting in open display cases just asking for it now, or do you lose more sales hiding them than you'd ever lose to a break in?

Source: ICv2

SGC's cheapest grade went from $18 to $50 on September 2.
Turnaround is still over 40 business days.
CGC is $17 a card at a 25 card minimum, but the wait is 150 working days.
TAG will do five business days for $150.

Would you rather pay $50 and wait two months at SGC, or $17 and wait most of a year at CGC?

Source: Sports Illustrated