Friday, February 14, 2020

It's In The Trash

All across Twitter I have seen some collectors brag about recent one-cent pack grabs from Dollar Tree while some others claim their store didn't have the packs or that their store wasn't allowed to sell them.

It's been said that Dollar Tree is no longer carrying football cards as they had been discontinued across the country. I am not sure if this is just for the 2019 packs or all in general.

My local Dollar Tree has been hit or miss with carrying cards or even Panini stickers but I wanted to see what they had anyways just in case mine was one of the lucky ones who was selling the one-cent packs. Only problem, I couldn't make it there due to a busy schedule.

I didn't want to miss out on such a great deal if my store was participating, so I asked myself -"self, how I am I going to pull this off?"- cause there is still a chance that a collector could exist in my area and swooped them all up.

***insert cartoon light bulb***

That's when my mother-in-law came to mind. She is long retired and takes plenty of trips to the mall where the Dollar Tree exists. My hair and ears curled like The Grinch in the cartoon as I called her hoping to hear a yes, "any chance your going to the mall today? I was wondering if you wanted to swing into Dollar Tree while you are there? I heard there could be one-cent packs of football cards!"

She said, "Sure!"

The plan was in place and I felt like a little kid with the cupcake with the most frosting at a birthday party. All I had to do was wait by my phone hoping she discovered some.

After about an hour, the phone rang and I knew it was her. I said a little prayer and I answered the phone to the disappointing but surprising news.

"They were told to throw them out."
"Excuse me?"
"They don't have them. They had to throw them out as that's what management wanted."

My heart sunk. The thought of possible Daniel Jones rookie cards and yellow parallels exclusive to those packs being tossed into the dumpster like trash.

 
No cards were hurt in the taking of this picture
My next thought was, should I ask her to be one of those cartoon animals that is diving for it's last bite of food or maybe even be like my grandmother when I was little and she would dumpster dive for Keebler cookies when the company would toss away the outdated boxes.

But, being the nice son-in-law I am, I didn't have her dive into the dumpster even though the visual thought played over and over in my mind. Instead I thanked her for trying. I just hope the the words of "throw them out" didn't actually mean literally throw them out.

This years Dollar Tree packs were actually worth the price of admission in my opinion. Years past, you would only get five base cards which I guess makes sense for $1. This year Panini upped their game and you can find rookies and even exclusive yellow parallels only to Dollar Tree. These yellow parallels actually have some value to them as well if you can hit the right players. With one yellow per pack and only five cards per pack for products that have bigger 200 to 300 card sets the odds you hit a good one are 1:200 to 1:300. Which is why the value is there.

Before all of this penny pack nonsense, I had actually busted some $1 basketball packs of Hoops and Absolute from there and felt more impressed by those then I did some recently hobby and retail breaks.

Here were my results from those breaks,

Giannis Yellow!

Love this throwback design

This was my first Barrett rookie

JA MORANT. This isn't an easy pull and these have sold for upwards $30-$40 for a Dollar Tree pack!

Barrett rookie number two from Absolute this time

The man, the myth, the legend Zion

And a couple more decent rookie yellow pulls from Absolute.

Also with these I thought about chasing down the base sets as well. These packs breaks did leave me wanting more and according to my mother-in-law in that same phone call they still had packs of these left there.

Unlike the poor, poor football cards. **playing sad music on a tiny violin**

Even with football season done, I still would have given a dollar a pack for them. I just hope it was just a discontinue of the 2019 packs and we will see 2020 ones when the times comes.

I really hope they keep bringing in basketball packs however, as I will keep throwing my dolla dolla bills at y'all.

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