General Forum

My lcs a year ago has only a few non sports cards. Now half the building is non gaming cards and funko pops. 

This is what I would call a sports collectibles shop. The ones I have gone into never seem to have cards of any kind. The game card shops only carry what is current and dont carry defunct games at all. They dont have non sports cards either. I never thought Star Trek cards would be so hard to find.

At least isn't like the handful of local "stores" I have seen pop up advertising themselves on FB Marketplace lately. Newly occupied storefronts with shelves of retail blasters at hobby or greater prices.

Not sure if it's any better or worse. Something I also thought was odd, not a single price on any of the cards they had. Kinda gives the impression that the price goes up depending on what you look like? (Higher if it appears you can afford it?)

One reason for learning from history. Count me as a skeptic regarding its future for a regular hobbyist like me. 

Interestingly enough, I just this morning had someone tell me that their son had opened a shop locally and described it using almost the same info you did... descriptiors included "high end", "modern" and "graded".

Not my cup of tea.

Pretty much the same thing over here. The two stores I consider to be my lcs are now splitted between sport cards and team merch for the first one and sport cards and non-sport/gaming cards for the other. Before the pandemic, they were also playing their games in the store and asking questions to the owner all the time.

Also, it is not really easy to start a new store, but some store owners don't help themselves. Over the years, I visited a few times some not so local stores and the owners were opening boxes of just one set or offering very few hit cards from other sets. They were opening like a box of the current Upper Deck hockey series, but they had nothing from the previous season or the one before. Would you see a Napa auto part store telling customers: "Sorry, but we stock 2021 Ford parts only. No 2020 Ford. No Chevy. No Toyota."? I can understand that not all store have rare vintage or obscure oddball, but I would expect at least something other that just one major set. No wonder they usually bit the dust.

It seems like they don't care as long as this year is selling. It's sad to see the lack of effort from them. I was the tried harder for the customers.