General Forum

This question is really for the card company insiders/former employees on the site, but anyone with knowledge feel free to answer:

With UERs, do companies not correct them because:

1. They don't catch them until production is done?

2. They catch them so late in production and decide it's not worth it?

3. A combination of 1 and 2?

4. Or just general indifference to correcting them?

You forgot #5, they didn't know they were printing UERs to begin with.

Usually #5. 

That was actually what I meant by #4. That they caught it during production and were like , "meh"🤷🏿‍♂️

Although I guess what you are saying is that they didn't catch it at any point. 

So many UERs aren't caught until well after production of the set has long since ceased.  Just reading on this site along, people are still finding them in cards from the 1970s-1980s, now that they can comb through the statistics with a fine tooth comb.

Many cards, especially modern cards, are printed all at once, so whatever it is, it is. There's no second run to correct it, there's no second series to put the corrected cards into, like 1989-90 Hoops did for example. That's why you almost never see an ERR/COR in modern sets. 

When I was with Star, we had a situation in 1992 where the design for one set was used with the wording for another (Stellar / Nova) for 2 of the players on only the promos. Since the cost would have been prohibitive high to go back and reprint for what was essentially 4 cards, we didn't bother. If the sets had been messed up, we probably would have.

We also let quite a few typographical errors go out in the first Hooters set. There were a coupl of us typing in the info, so it could have been me, it could have been someone else. We didn't see them at all. I wasn't even aware until years later.

We did have 2 standalone player sets get completely botched that were fixed. (The owner messed these up.) One set wound up being "Bobby Bonds", which was of course featuring Barry, and the other set was for "Jose Conseco". I think both of these have now made it into the hobby (not by me, although I had at least one of each), but originally, they went deep into the warehouse. 

Yes I think most companies don't realise until it's too late.

I was actually just adding some cards where the company did notice early enough to correct the error on the back of the cards, which means that a lot of people have two sets - one with the typo and one without.

Some of the errors carry over through multiple years of a company release, so they don't even catch them after the first time