Ron Churches

They are hiring like crazy and someone speculated that they are adding physical space. So did PSA. The processes involved in grading aren't easily scalable. If it were, there would be new entrants into the marketplace doing it better/faster. All the grading companies are watching mail trucks dump millions of cards in their warehouse, knowing there's just no way they can get to it quick enough. Back to econ 101, these are capacity constraints interacting with an industry with very high barriers of entry and low scalability of capacity. It's a linear function, which is why they can make the estimates in the first place, so long as they know how many cards are going to land in their lap. If those estimates on the # of cards coming in spike, I will let you figure out what it does to the linear function that spits out how long it will take for the order to come out.

Yeah, has to be. That big of a jump, they must have crunched some numbers and needed to throw up a stop sign before it gets even crazier.

You need 50 cards submitted, PERIOD, to get bulk price on any of the cards you are submitting. But that can mix/match tiers. If you did 49 cards under 100 in raw value and 1 Zard worth 400, by the letter of their policy you should submit the 49 as bulk tier and the 1 Zard as..I guess Economy. You'll pay the additional grading fee for the Zard. You'll also end up splitting your order into two parts, essentially, triggering one new 5 dollar fee of the additional grading tier. It'll also result in having two shipments, which means you'll pay more for shipping. If you sneak the Zard in on as bulk with a 100 dollar value, they can choose to bump your card up to Economy, anyway. It'll slow the whole order down, but might not trigger the extra fee or shipping. Honestly might be cheaper to risk that on one card.

Free market, baby! Lmk where you find a lower TaT, especially for the price. When you do, though, everyone will move there and you'll be waiting in that line as well. There just isn't enough capacity in the entire INDUSTRY to meet the demand.

Y'all realized that the solution to this problem is to raise prices, right? It's a supply/demand function with a capacity that isn't easily raised. Every day around here is a new lesson in economics 101.

I hope so, need to get folks out of the line one way or another, so if you want to bail...

It speaks to volume, not value. Economy is just 'bulk' for cards over 100 dollars raw. I imagine they are moving TaT's in line with how quickly they can move things along to hit a reasonable result on Standard and above. Throwing a huge TaT increase on Economy will shift demand to Standard, or will result in less cards being sent in (both = smoother timing for CGC overall, I think).

Economy and bulk being so close is interesting. Just a designation around insurance value, I suppose. RIP my two bulk orders, but I'll live. Gonna change my strategies and move into standard territory, which I think is what they want to see happen. Less cards subbed, higher value cards in general.

Mine also has subgrades. 10 cards. I think the missing piece for some of this is the 'research' process where they validate and key all the cards in. That has to be where things get out of FIFO order.

Japanese cards just do better with CGC, I swear. That's a beautiful card.

Oh boy, my standard from 2/11 went to Scheduled for Grading today. It's so close, I can taste it.

If you want things to go smoothest once they get the cards, just redo the order. If they never get the order you did originally, it just doesn't mean anything to anyone.

Really hoping my 2/11 standard sub moves to grading before EOW; still sitting in received. 20 days. Gotta be getting close.

It 'only' went for 150 on the accepted offer. Looks like either a very uninformed person or someone doing some price manipulation.

Absolutely, they have a great aesthetic. They coordinate with the CSG color scheme, too (which is not exactly my taste, but whatever). The Murph was for my PC and the others...I'm not sure what I'll do with them. I do with both CSG and CGC had opted for better typography on their labels. It's one of the main detractors they have. It's more about the card, which is fine, but...just a little more work. All that white space when no sub-grades is distracting. At least they learned the CGC lesson and centered the grade in the box. Small details, but they add up. I'll sub again, I'm sure.

I'm pretty please, overall. I scooped that Murphy rookie (I have several) on eBay because it looked really good for the price, and getting an 8 is impressive for that pickup. The hoops cards were from a set break; the rest of the set is similar. I had hoped they'd lean more toward 8 than 7, but I'm pretty happy to have these. I am not sure if I want to grade out the other HOFers and rookies (that set has a TON), given they probably don't add a ton of value in the market, but I figured everyone was going to be sending in Modern cards and I was curious how some vintage would do.

The basketball cards I sent.

Got my cards back.

Good to know. Curious when you get billed/invoiced? I've got 2/11 and I am thinking it will move along this week. They didn't trim from 25 to 22 days on standard without knowing how this was going to go.

If you look those sales up on https://130point.com/sales/ you can see what the accepted offer was.

It's back up, guys.

Ok, it's back up! My cards have graded and marked for shipping now, but looks like Fedex doesn't have it (estimated Tuesday delivery). I'm not surprised by my grades, though was (as we always are) hoping for a little more upside. I AM happy with my grade 8 Dale Murphy rookie. That one did pretty well. I see a handful on eBay now, all modern, and mostly 9s and 9.5 grades. I think they will be hard to hit 10s like CGC is; probably use similar technology.

I wish I'd have seen my grades, but I must have missed that. I also have no submissions in there now. I think they are trying to fix things behind the scenes. Maybe related to their accounting issues. I'd love to be able to tell if my cards shipped...

I just came here to post this. Looks like they had the last four of my CC# but the rest got dropped off in some sort of transfer between systems. I called them and paid my invoice and she released it to shipping in the system.

So, I emailed them about why my status went 'blank'. I finally got a response today that it was 'in accounting'. I'd already gotten an invoice a couple of days ago, but after the response I got another one (identical). I am guessing they are refining the process of getting things into the payment process. Since it previously was in 'scheduled for grading', I am curious if they are doing something else. They are going to generate a LOT of questions for themselves if the status goes blank while they count beans. Could be an anomaly or could be an issue with my payment (that would be unexpected on my end, but maybe I fat fingered the CC#?). Perhaps they intend to hold back the grades until they've processed payment? Seems unlikely that they'd want the status to have nothing in it at all, though. Idk. I'm a patient dude, so this isn't bothering me much.