Ha ha, 1985 Topps football card at Walgreens!

sdkcp

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Hi all, I bought one of those random lots of cards from my local Walgreens that they have in the toy section sometimes. It looks like they are distributed by a company called The Fairfield.

So you get 75 cards for 3.99 plus 6% sales tax of course, so each card costs 0.0564 approximately.

They have baseball and football at this local store. I didn't see anything great on the baseball packs and I have been much more interested in football lately, so I picked one up, hoping to find some All Pros or something else useful for my new collecting focused projects.

These things were pretty recently packed because I had about 10 2008 Score cards in my "pack." Also, one of the other packs had a 2008 Tom Brady on the front. These are the clamshell packages so you can see 4 cards, and the sides of all the rest.

So I picked the one with the 1988 Topps Tony Dorsett and Warren Moon on it (two of my all-time favorites). Of course the Dorsett has a stain on the front, I hope it's a wax stain!!!

There were a bunch of 1988 Topps including an All-Pro Mark Bavarro. Nothing else really fancy. The oldest card was a 1985 Topps Mosi Tatupu!

Ha, ha! 24 year old commons at Walgreens!!!

Also, a 1995 Score Summit Edition Napoleon Kaufman rookie. Anyone know anything about the 1995 Score Summit Edition, I am not familiar with it.

I wonder who packs these things, and if there is any rhyme or reason to packing these "random" lots.

Do you think they have rules like, minimum 20 Topps, 10 Score, etc.?

Or do you think it's a free-for-all?

It's a fun couple of bucks, because the cards come from such a variety of sets. Anyone ever buy any of these?

Also Carmelo just had a monster dunk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

csmtampa

Fairfield packs them.

They repack tons of items you for sale at your local department store.

25 ct lots, 75 ct lots, 200 cts lot, 10 packs, 20 packs, 1 game used plus 5 packs etc etc.....

sdkcp

Oh yeah, I've seen the one game used plus packs at Wal-Mart as well. I didn't know they did those too.

I've bought a couple of those 8 random packs for 9.95, of course all the big hits are out of them, but there are some nice star cards in there once in a while. I can't remember the last time I bought one of those.

I should buy one of the 8 packs and post my results, then we could all see if it was worth the 10 bucks (unlikely, but possible). Maybe I can make a contest out of it.

stevek

the last blaster I bought of this type, the cards on almost every pack, the corners were badly dinged on one or two corners....

.....but in any event I'll probably buy another one sometime in the future. LOL

gecko109

I did see those last time I was at Walgreens. I didnt realize just how attractive the 1988 Topps Dan Marino card is!!!

Post25

I bought one a year or two ago. It had a Mattingly topps rookie. Sent it to get PSA and it came back a 9! Not bad!

jacksoncoupage

They used to have 75 (or maybe 100) ct. blister of just ERROR cards. I couldn't believe it! So I bought 4 of them, 3 had almost the exact same cards!! Since they were all Topps blank backs and fronts (mainly 1989-1991) I wasn't too bothered but I was expecting a mix of errors from different sets.

Another time, I bought a 75 ct. football mix that had a Pro Set card that I knew had a potential rare variation on the back. I opened it and it was the rare version, I ended up selling it for $25 a week or so later.

They used to be full of those semi-rare late-90's pacific RED parallels from 7-11 packs. I used to find chunks of them whenever I bought the baseball blisters - good stuff.

fur72

I dont buy these so much as I do the "8 Packs in a box" for 9.99. I have actually got some decent pulls from them. Usually what happens though is 4 packs you can see on the outside are current then the 4 packs inside are 1987 topps wax.

DrJ

Why would you buy a pack of cards which has already been sorted? Obviously any card of value has already been removed and you may end up with a Star on top used to sell the pack worth about $0.25 on a good day and the rest marginal commons. These packs are for little kids who just want to have some cards to own.

jacksoncoupage

<< <i>Why would you buy a pack of cards which has already been sorted? Obviously any card of value has already been removed and you may end up with a Star on top used to sell the pack worth about $0.25 on a good day and the rest marginal commons. These packs are for little kids who just want to have some cards to own. >>



Because there are plenty of cards of value that the average collector (who reads price guides for values) doesn't know are rare, sought-after by niche collectors (variation/error collectors, player-specific collectors, master set collectors).

I'm not saying that these are a good buy 90% of the time, but besides being fun (usually getting a bizarre assortment of stuff including oddballs), they have occasionally yielded some great stuff for my PC and have made me decent money on ebay.

Some more interesting pulls from these blisters:

-Star Co. Promos of Griffey, Robin Ventura ( !!! ), Frank Thomas
-1999 Pacific Aurora Red semistar singles
-1980's Topps Glossy All-Star variations of McGwire, Mattingly, Ripken and Boggs
-1998 Pacific Online Red semistar singles
- those shortprints in 1998 Upper Deck Series 3 that used to sell for a lot
-1990 and 1990 Pro Set errors: #8 Jim Kelly w/ Reg Symbol, #328 Tasker w/ Half Reg Symbol, 1990 Art Shell LARGE HOF banner
-1991 Score Ronnie Lott CC ERROR
-various 1981 Fleer "finger" errors
-1992-93 Hoops Unredeemed Lottery Redemption card
-1998 Crash The Game Ken Caminiti Instant Winner (unredeemed)
-Countless minor variations that I've sold for $2-5

Tabe

I used to buy the multi-pack deals all the time a few years ago. In fact, they helped get me into collecting football cards. Toys R Us used to carry these boxes that had 20 packs for $19.99 in them plus a bonus item. You could see all 20 packs so you knew exactly what you were getting. And when they first started doing them, the packs were good. There would be anywhere from 6-12 good hobby packs, and then a random mix of older crap and junk retail current stuff. The bonus item varied as well, anything from NFL airplanes to NFL stickers to an unopened Bowman's Best hobby pack (guaranteed auto or jersey in every pack).

My co-worker and I would go about once a week to buy these and we got at least 1 auto or jersey in every single box we bought. They were a lot of fun to buy and bust. Heck, I got a $100 Walter Payton jersey card in one of mine.

Unfortunately, they started loading these up with garbage packs eventually and we stopped buying them

Tabe

Beck6

I bought one last year because it had a 1986 Topps Nolan Ryan on top. The centering was good, but the corners were just OK and it had a print mark. Some fun packs were included.