How do you rip 40 cases of anything?

FredF

I know the story is a few weeks old, but ran across this today : http://mybaseballcardblog.com/topps/2013-topps-football-40-case-break/

How do you physically rip 40 cases of anything? I mean, it's easy if you just open the packs, search for the hits, pull them aside and then price them on ebay. But that won't pay for the cases, will it? What do you do with the umpteen thousand cards as you're ripping? How do you sort them in a sane, efficient manner?

I'm putting my 2013 set together, ripping packs during football games with the kids. I'm sorting cards the same way I did when I was a kid - sort them into stacks by the hundreds digits, then for each hundred sort them by the tens, then open up my album and see which cards are dupes and which are cards I need. It's pretty time consuming (which is a good thing, in this case) but I sat there trying to figure out how I would physically rip 40 cases, and then try to get the cards I ripped organized in a way that I could do anything meaningful as far as selling them.

-Fred

heritage

I wish I had the money to try.
The sorting would be crazy. I neck hurts just sorting a 1000 cards.

bziddy

It's a well oiled machine -- he has people help generally. He sells lots offline. Has buyers that will preorder multiple sets. He sells a lot through twitter as well. The crazy part is how fast he breaks and turns all the product.

TNP777

link goes here

Nice article, Craig!

esquiresports

Back in the days when I was still a teenager, I partnered with a guy and we broke 1990 basketball cases by the pallet - thousands and thousands of each card. It was pretty crazy. I was the operations guy tasked with making it as efficient a process as possible. I had a couple people who would open packs and discard the wax-stained card (when we did wax). The next group of people broke the packs into stacks of 10 (1-10, 11-20, 21-30, etc.). The sorting trays full of cards would then move to the last group, who sorted them into into single cards. This was before the grading era, so they were just dropped into cardboard sorting boxes that had 10 slots. Once broken down to singles, they were placed into 5,000 count boxes and stacked toward the sky. One row per card. It was boring work, and people were not that motivated. I switched payment from hourly to by production and output suddenly more than doubled. It was a win-win. Really easy money then. Maybe now as well - I just don't follow closely enough. My recollection is that one could open and sort a case of 10,800 cards into number order in 6-8 hours. I used to break cases myself just to establish a baseline for sorting to motivate people but not overpay.

Before this larger operation, I had several of my friends and their families breaking cases on a pay-per-case basis. It was an easy way to make some extra money while watching TV. It all worked well except with Pro Set. Some of my "friends" pocked the Lombardi holograms. It was easier to track distributions when there were no inserts and random odds to deal with.

UnwoundSage

For this rip mentioned in article, best bet is be equipped with knowledge of the market and patience. Don't dump rookie autos and "hits" just to try and immediately recoop some of your investment. Wait til the player is hot and his cards are peaking (always happens with almost every rookie), then sell. Not sure I have the time or patience to organize into base sets but there are still base set collectors and I assume he could make close to 100 base sets to sell individually.

bziddy

Out of 40 cases he probably ended up with 300+ base sets. Throw in the master sets and he has to have recouped at least half of the case investment on sets alone. The only way to do a break like this is to build sets.

3BoyzTrading

I see that it's Topps football.Hopefully it's the Jumbo version. Set 40 cases of Modern football or baseballk in front of me. I'd be done in 24 hours.

bziddy

I think it'd take me five 12-hour days just to rip 480 boxes of Topps FB or BB. That's not sorting or listing anything. Then you have 170k cards to sort. In my spare time after work I think it would only take me about 4 months to open, list, and sort everything.

Bosox1976

Interesting read - love Esquire's fleer story.

Mapleleaf

Not something I could do. I lose focus and start reading the cards, even if I've read them before.

zep33

If I don't sort as I open, they don't get sorted. So I have a room full of unsorted cards from 2007 to 2012

Stingray

<< <i>I see that it's Topps football.Hopefully it's the Jumbo version. Set 40 cases of Modern football or baseballk in front of me. I'd be done in 24 hours. >>



Yes it was the jumbo.

BenG76

I would love to know how they get everything sorted so fast. I have one of those plastic sorting trays which is great. It still takes me hours to sort multiple boxes. I ripped 6 wax boxes and a rack box of 86 Topps and it has taken me quite a while to sort them and I am still working on it.