Ron Churches

Similar to PSA, I think the majority of their business is in the sports card realm. I think this will have a bigger impact on CSG, where there will be a whole month or so where PSA and Beckett aren't available at all for sports card grading. I assume this will tick up a bit for CGC, but I doubt there's a huge volume of graders who are opting for Beckett over CGC that wouldn't just hold out a month for PSA to open back up. Idk, but this one will likely not make a dramatic difference for CGC.

Yes.

I suspect that they've made some operational changes that are moving cards through the phases quicker, but they are just queuing longer in the grading phase. I bet they invested heavily where they could get most short term lift, which is putting staff on the admin side and getting cards ready to grade. That's trainable stuff. Longer tail to get a grader up to speed, and they likely need to shadow new graders during training (which basically means grading things twice or more?). Idk. I had my express go to 'grading' really quick, but it's now been sitting there a few days. I think we're just seeing the queue move around internally and they don't have enough granularity in these status codes to really clue us in.

Real talk, I think CGC and PSA and BGS are hoping that some WILL go without. Think about it; they all bill after grading now, so as the mountain piles up and they scan in the submission form, they absolutely can calculate their actual revenue through...maybe end of year or even mid-2022? I suppose they'd have to estimate the higher services, but that revenue is largely locked in. They can afford to some customers off and force them to competitors and/or become no graders. Hell, it probably boosts their outlook for 2022. Notice they've gotten Express and Wlkthrough cleaned up MOVING FORWARD. That's the customers they care about most (pay more = care more). If I were OP here, I'd be on the phone with them complaining. That seems to get traction pretty quick on the egregious oversights like this. I am also always curious what the cards are when stuff like this happens. Are they super rare and need research? Are they hung up in authentication? There are real process reasons why things might delay beyond stated TaT, too.

The lack barriers of entry to becoming a painter make it such that a delay like this couldn't be tolerated. It's easy to become a painter (relatively), especially compared to a complicated service such as collectible grading. A better comparison would be cable companies or satellite providers. There are very few of them, so your substitutions are hard to do (sometimes impossible, depending on where you live). Therefore, the tolerance customers have to have during poor customer service experiences must be higher; your alternative here is to take your cards to one of the select other grading companies who are experiencing similar customer service issues OR not grade your cards.

I had an express order received 5/19 that moved to Grading, I think, yesterday. I thought that was quicker than expected, and today they updated Express to only 7 days. I think they've been able to get ahead of the Express/Walkthrough situation now. That must have come, on average, at the expense of standard...that bumped up a little bit.

Might need to call them on this one.

My guy, you're gonna need to tell us what your 70 cards are.

That's just your receipt. You'll only pay once! They get enough for it, lol.

When you mail it in? You're giving them the payment information and they are invoicing it, but no transaction is actually occurring at that stage. You could throw that paper away and not send the cards and nothing will ever happen. Unless you are talking about the receipt they send you with your cards (and I think that also goes to email); that's for your records.

Yes, pretty soon after.

Good to see they are in the new year now! I have been expecting my March submission to be home in October and my April submission to be in December. My May submission might be February or later. Definitely changing my plans a bit around how I collect.

I'm agreeing that they have been overinflated by manipulation and irrational buying/selling, but I think some of that value will stick. This, despite, the quantity of these cards being around. It's net-good for that random binder of Marvel we've had for years and years, but probably won't pay for retirement.

There are a lot of them out there, but I think this has resulted in the value of them going up a good bit that will probably hang around. I don't know that fishing for 10s on the non-chase cards makes much sense, long term.

This seems to only benefit them by smoothing out the receiving a little, am I wrong?

Keying them in as miscellaneous was a good idea.

You've outed yourself as the CGC database programmer. Please optimize your stuff.

the cards I managed to get through over the last few days were still in the cart for the old price. I keyed the rest at the new price and checked out. We'll see how that works.

I am begging you to never run an IT shop. Please, promise me you will stay out of IT.

Agreed. I was miffed about the future of low end bulk (I like to grade some questionable stuff for my PC and my kids), but it's still ONLY 13.50 a card with the membership, no subgrades. This is still too low to stop the insanity, I think. If anything, it might boost some of the asks on the marketplace and pull the price of low end CGC slabs up a slight bit.

I do think their competitive value versus PSA has narrowed with this price increase, but this price increase was also necessary to squash down demand a bit so they can keep TaT in line with...well, inside of a year. The market dynamics are tough to nail down and PSA had the first mover advantage by doubling their prices AND shutting doors for a couple of months, which sent folks to CGC faster than they could handle. I doubt PSA drew it up like that, but they had to see the benefit of handcuffing CGC while also hitting their own operational priorities when they made their recent moves. I do think CGC is going to have to navigate a 'death by a thousand papercuts' situation now, as if their website couldn't handle the load, that means they are about to get an unprecedented number of cards and will be forced to shift TaT again. They've gone to the 'price increase' well twice now; they probably regret going so modest on that first price hike. I imagine we'll see them shut down a few service tiers, like PSA did, in the coming month or two.

Exactly. PSA's site is much smoother. It's odd to me, though, because they had this same infrastructure for the comics, as well, and then leveraged it again for sports cards. It's all sitting on top of the same database infrastructure. I know they are all separate companies, so I am imagining a hot mess of an organizational structure around their IT. These systems also feed billing, which I also know are a bit of a mess (both CGC and CSG has somehow had my billing information disconnect from the orders as the invoice gets routed through the process). These things point towards lack of investment, which is an organizational strategy that is legitimately questioned when things go poorly. I'm connecting the dots, as well, on their lack of a population report.

How would I know that, indeed. I'm sure they've had to make a few hardware upgrades to accommodate increased traffic. If you look through the boards there have been a lot of posts related to their software being erratic over the last few months. These are not new issues and they persist. It's embarrassing. Their query times are atrocious, even when traffic is lower. Notice how long it takes for fields to populate when you tab through the form? The site runs like an early 2000s web form. Things like this fly in the face of how they are trying to differentiate their product as high quality. Note that the reason they are getting slammed is largely a function of their lower price compared to peers, yet they have a reputation for being high quality in terms of the grade on the slab. From a business standpoint these have long been at odds for CGC, which I think leads to confusion in the marketplace (and a factor in why their resale is lower than PSA despite having a better reputation, generally, in terms of grading strictness). My larger point is that taking the cheap way out in terms of IT infrastructure sends a signal that they are aiming to be a discount marketplace, not a top flight shop. It's at odds with their overall marketing strategy, and you can feel the anger from folks who are having to reset expectations on their service quality. You can feel it in Paul's passive aggressive replies on these boards, which are now being quoted and mocked, because they ended up being paper thin and patronizing in light of the catastrophic level of service they have deployed in the last few days. A world class shop should be embarrassed by this performance. If CGC isn't, that's enough to give me pause on future business with them. I like the slabs, I like the quality, and we are now being asked to trade price for...what? What is the consumer getting from their increased prices? I'm ok with the price increase, only as a function of it delivering a better experience when I use them as a service.

Their business has increased, what, tenfold in a year? Has there been any improvements to their IT infrastructure? I don't think so. Find a bigger defender of CGC's grading on these boards than I have been. I've cut them a lot of slack. This one stings, though, and the response has (for the first time I've seen) seemed to be passive-aggressive toward the average customer. As for my posting volume, I made a joke thread and then this one. Your valuable feedback on my posting technique is noted. I assume you are compelled to click each thread, which can be problematic. It will not hurt my feelings if you would like to ignore my topics, generally speaking.

The 28th deadline has exposed a serious issue with regards to your submission software. You absolutely need to optimize your database queries. This is embarrassing for CGC.