Andy Gardecki

What cards are you getting 10 on? Anything older than a year or two? I've seen a lot of high grades on Topps Now and Prizm stuff, but then again that stuff gets about 80% 10s from PSA.

I sent one of those in too. They definitely are checking these cards very close.

Discreetly take pics of the retail boxes marked up in price at the card shop and send it to the manufacturer. They love to see that stuff. Many of the boxes say right on them that they can only be sold at specific stores (like the Bowman mega boxes that recently came out).

I've been losing faith as I waited for my standard order, but in the end I guess what I needed to do is stop thinking about how long it was taking. Sent out on 4/5, arrived on 4/9 but USPS didn't mark it as delivered until 4/12. Marked received on 6/16. Scheduled for Grading on 6/24. Grading/Quality Control on 7/9. Finalized/Shipped on 7/22. So, what I believe is happening here (as many people suspect) is that the turnaround times do not include the time from delivered to marked receive. When I sent mine in the standard turnaround time was 30 business days. Mine took 25 days from marked received to shipped. This is totally acceptable. What's not acceptable is the 46 business days it took from when it arrived to when they "received" it. Next time we'll see if marking it ST on the box will help. On the plus side, the grades were great. I spent a lot of time looking for the cleanest copies of cards I had to see how tough CSG would grade them. Of the 15 cards I got 2 10s (both Pristine), 6 9.5s, 6 9s and 1 8.5. Love the high end ones and I'll spend some time looking at the 9s and 8.5 to learn what I missed.

Putting ST on the outside of the box is a relatively new thing that they recently started to suggest. When most of us who are waiting right now sent our standard orders it wasn't being done unfortunately.

I'm still confused. Are we counting days after they check our cards in for the service time? I sure hope not since my Standard order took well over 2 months before they decided to open the box and put my cards in the system. That was 50 business days (and I sent mine when it was 32 days for Standard). Now it's been another 10 business days with no progress. So, does that mean I have to wait another 37 business days before my order is done (making it 47 days from when it was checked in)? That would mean almost 100 days for a Standard order. Doesn't seem right.

Based on the box of my original collection, it seems that my first packs had to be 1970 Topps Baseball, but only maybe 5-6 packs or so. The next few seasons I had hundreds of each year and I remember splitting boxes with one of my friends at the time.

I feel that regret. I'm actually looking through my top cards right thinking if I can risk sending them to PSA for $300. Sounds crazy, but right now I've got absolutely nothing new coming in from graders and the poor value on SGC and HGA makes me consider it. I chose CSG because I thought they would prioritize their services properly and I'd pay a little extra to get good service. Bulk orders of junk wax are absolutely killing grading.

Just ignore him. He's been shilling for the company from his first post on. He sent a Jordan rookie in and they returned it as trimmed and instead of being upset, he was glad that they did it. Since then he's been telling us all how to feel and how not to complain and how great they are and how bad all the other companies (which he has never used) are and how he would never use them. I sure hope he's just some kind of fanboy and not actually working for them.

If it had a EV grade with it in the returned card then it means evidence of trimming or other alteration. I went over this with them on the phone and told them that the cards I sent were not trimmed and they told me then the card was probably too thin which indicates that it may have been pressed. (that wasn't true either, but if you had your card in a screw down then it's very possible).

I got 2 of my first order of 5 cards sent back for that. They basically stole my money because their computer doesn't understand that cards had different sizes sometimes back then. One was a Bowman Brady rookie and the other was a Kobe Bowman's Best rookie. I got both in packs and they went right in plastic (not screwdowns). Haven't touched them in 20 years.

Honestly I didn't because it doesn't say to do that (at least it didn't say that when I created the order). My only previous order with CSG was 1 express and 4 standard which I wrote EX on the box. It processed really fast, but also it was sent in only a day or two after they opened so I think it was all fast back then. I really hope they go to barcodes on the boxes. Not a big fan of PSA, but that system works.

That's for Pokemon and Magic. Not sportscards.

The more I read here, the more I become concerned. My standard order arrived on 4/8. It hasn't been checked in. Back then the timing for standard had just moved to 32 business days. So today is the 35th business day and mine is not only not on the way back to me, but it's not checked in. I realize that's about what the rest of you are saying, but I guess I wasn't putting it all in perspective. I'm also getting discouraged at seeing all these people who have their bulk orders in the system already because they sent 601 cards in (600 bulk and 1 express) so they all got checked in. I can't understand how CSG doesn't see that as a problem. I can't ever see myself being a bulk submitter. It's not that I don't have 50+ star player low value cards (I've got at least 200,000 that fit that criteria). It's just that I don't want to see myself as part of the problem. I sent in 15 cards with an average value of $400. I used standard as per the rules. I know my order was perfect on paper and perfect in the box. So why is it that I feel like I'm sitting behind some order that's got 1000 $10 cards packed into a big box with no order and an extra $2 per card being spent so they don't have to identify the cards? I guess the $10,000 that the bulk submitter paid trumps my little $530 order.

Are they paying you? I think complaints come along with any business and if the business wants to have a message board then I guess they can expect complaints. I mean, there are ways to reduce the complaints and the top one would be more transparency. Better communication with the customers (even if it's not always good news) will almost always reduce the number of complaints.

Where did you see that? It says March 29, 2021 on https://www.csgcards.com/submit/services-fees/csg/ Still not ideal.

I can appreciate this on a low value card like this, especially in PSA 9 condition. What I want to see is an uptick in value for high value cards where the difference between a PSA 10 And CSG 9.5 right now is so large that it's not worth trying to sell any of them yet. I've played with putting a high value card 9.5 out on eBay for a slightly less value than PSA 10 for the same card, but I haven't even been able to attract an offer. I'm confident that this gap will start to close, but it might take some time.

Call their customer service. And don't get too excited just yet. The USPS can be a real crapshoot these days. I ship and receive a lot of items all the time and it's amazing the number of times I've been told that my package has been returned to sender only to find it at my PO Box the next morning.

I guess I've never looked at any of this as a way to turn a $2 card into a $20 card with a $10 profit. My rule of thumb is that I will send it in if I know that even at a grade of 8 the card will be worth more than raw plus grading. For a majority of these new cards that won't be the case unless it's a big rookie card so I never send non rookies unless it's something older of a star who can pull a lot of value (i.e. Jordan, Kobe, Brady, Lebron). While I think everyone has the right to do whatever they want as long as the companies allow it, I'd be all in favor of a moratorium on bulk orders of low level cards looking for big grades to make a minimal profit. I'm sure that won't happen, but until it does we'll all be sitting here waiting on our orders and complaining.

Not at all my point. I mean that with PSA when my cards arrive at their facility the bar code on the outside of the box is scanned and updated on the website and also sorted by type of submission (at least until they stopped taking anything below Super Express). Not only does that system keep the customers up to date, but it insures that lower service orders are not being done before higher service. PSA isn't usable right now, but I sure wish CSG would consider adding a barcode on the packages. It would reduce the number of complaint threads here by 90%.

That's probably the one thing I'm most unhappy about. I paid for Standard, they don't have a way to tell that my order is standard so now it's sitting behind a ton of bulk and economy orders and not getting processed because they don't know it's standard. No matter how slow PSA has become, that was never a possibility.

I've been out of the hobby for about 15 years (kids took up my time) so now that I decided to get back in I realized I had to grade some. First one I graded was a Steph Curry Crown Royale auto rc and I used PSA. Was almost certain it was a 10 when I sent it and they returned it as a 8. I realized right then that regardless of the prices for PSA graded cards, I didn't want to get blind grades back with no explanation. I moved to CSG and while I'm not happy with the slowness of the service, the cards I have gotten back were fairly graded and the sub grades let me know exactly what to look for in the future.

This is a really good example of why it might be worth the $10 for subs. Without knowing what they dinged you for it's tough to tell from just the pictures. With a refractor from what I've seen it oftentimes comes down to a poor surface grade. The centering might be 8-8.5 (can't imagine it's worse) but that's not going to cause a 7.5. The edges and corners look good in the pictures, but it's so hard to see the surface.

I'm still kind of confused by this. I sent in a 15 card standard order that arrived at your facility on 4/8. I don't know when you acknowledged it because the little app wasn't working then. A couple weeks ago the app returned to the page and my order showed as received and stored safely, but doesn't give a date. It hasn't ever showed up in my submissions. So, if my standard order is supposed to be done in 32 days (the number of days promised when I placed the order) I calculate that 26 of those (Monday to Friday only) days are used up. But without the order showing up in my submissions it seems unlikely that the order will be done in 32 (or even 45) days. I know it's been said before, but I hope you plan on getting a bar code on your packages so when they enter the facility they get on our accounts. It would reduce these questions by 90% (and probably most of the complaints).

I'm not sure what a fair price would be, but I almost feel like if they wanted to use this as a positive instead of how people perceive it right now, they should have set their grading prices with the $10 already included and then offered a $10 discount to anyone who doesn't want the sub-grades. Same money in the end, but people do love to see the word discount (and definitely hate the word upcharge)