$25k stolen in 1 minute. Thieves hit Lexington shops amid national trading card frenzy
It only took about 68 seconds for a burglary suspect to smash through the front door of Jimmy’s Kentucky Roadshow Shop, a Lexington trading card store, snatch about $25,000 worth of cards and take off.
The cops and owner Jimmy Mahan were on the scene within minutes in the early morning hours of April 29, but it was too late to stop anything. The “smash and grab” burglar was gone with a bunch of unopened, untraceable card packs.
In another burglary last month, a man kicked in the glass door of a different Lexington card shop and made off with a “large quantity” of baseball trading cards, according to Lexington police. The shop, Baseball Card Warehouse, posted about the break-in on Facebook, saying it caused “a mess and a lot of issues with inventory.”
Suspects hadn’t been apprehended in either of the Lexington burglaries as of Friday, according to police.
Earlier this week in Louisville, alleged burglars cut a hole in the roof of Louisville Sports Cards and Gaming and stole cards and unopened boxes. The store said in a social media post that whoever took them had been to the store previously.
“They avoided all security cameras and motion detectors,” the store said in a post. “They cut a hole in the roof and entered through the ceiling.”
An overwhelming craze for trading cards hasn’t only caused problems locally. Target decided in May to cease selling all MLB, NFL, NBA and Pokemon trading cards for safety reasons after a man in Wisconsin pulled out a gun while other people assaulted him over the cards, according to multiple reports.
Ryan Fagan from Sporting News wrote last month that the altercation in Wisconsin was a wake-up call about the state of the trading card industry.
“Heading into the summer of 2021, the trading card hobby is stronger — more interest, more money, more momentum — than it has been in decades. Where strength resides, though, conflict often follows,” he wrote.
KAKE.com in Kansas quoted a local card shop owner who said the surge in trading card interest was a “COVID craze.” Another report from North Dakota called the trading card industry “the hottest market in the world.”
But Mahan, the 44-year-old owner of the Kentucky Roadshow Shop and a longtime enthusiast of card trading, said the pandemic isn’t solely responsible for a booming trading card market.
Mahan pointed to evidence that the trading card market was outpacing the S&P 500’s return on investment and recent efforts from card companies to limit supply, which increases exclusivity.
Add in an international market for the NBA and its trading cards, plus a major nostalgia kick from the 1980s and 1990s NBA fans after the release of ESPN’s “The Last Dance,” and you have what Mahan called a “perfect storm.”
“The pandemic amplified something that had been trending the right way for a decade,” he said.
Not your grandfather’s trading cards – this is big money
The trading card business is a lot different than some people think, Mahan said. Compare the days when parents bought their children a cheap pack with a few cards and a stick of gum to today when rare cards are going for a few million dollars apiece. In the past year alone, at least 15 sports trading cards have sold for more than $1 million.
A Mickey Mantle card sold in January for $5.2 million. A LeBron James card sold in April matched that price. In February, someone paid $4.6 million for a Luka Dončić card. Dončić, who plays for the Dallas Mavericks, has only been in the NBA since 2018.
Forbes in 2019 said that the trading card market was trouncing the S&P 500. The investment performance of professionally-graded trading cards yielded a 10-year return of 165 percent as of December 2018. The dividends only got bigger. Fast-forward to March of this year and that return had ballooned to more than 400 percent, according to the eBay marketplace index.
On top of long-term increases in card values, there are major opportunities for people to “flip” cards for a quick payday. A pack of 15 basketball cards could be bought at Target for under $10. The buyer could sell those cards for more than $40 on eBay.
“People see quick money and they jump in,” Mahan said.
The trading card industry is just like the sneaker industry or the market around any other collectibles, Mahan said. When demand is high, people want to take advantage of sky-high profits when they resell rare cards.
There are less expensive card packs for kids who just want the cards and aren’t worried about resale value.
Even then, some kids are getting a lot of bang for their buck. Mahan said a child came into the Kentucky Roadshow Shop for his 10th birthday and pulled a $10,000 card out of a $70 pack.
There is potential for a buyer to hit the jackpot. Packs can be sold in retail stores at a fixed price, but the pack may feature an extremely rare card, such as a 1-of-1 autographed Stephen Curry card. The value of that single card would likely be well beyond the cost of the whole pack.
A global market helps make trading profitable. International love for basketball has driven prices on NBA cards higher. Mahan has shipped products to customers in China, Australia and Switzerland. For baseball lovers, the market expands to Japan. For the NFL, it expands to England.
Big money presents opportunities for thieves
With sky-high values on some cards and buyers who come from all over the world, burglaries and fights are “kind of an unfortunate natural progression,” Mahan said.
It’s likely that the people stealing from the stores are trading card enthusiasts who know the shops they’re stealing from. Stealing unopened packs makes the cards inside virtually “untraceable,” Mahan said.
If someone stole an individual high-value card from a shop, the owner wouldn’t have much trouble tracking it down. A lot of cards have a serial number, or they’re numbered to show how many of them were made, Mahan said. If sold on eBay, the card can be traced because the numbers are displayed on the cards themselves.
Mahan said he increased the security in his store “big time,” adding additional locks. Before the theft, the store already had plexiglass windows, which take longer to break through than normal glass, a security system in place and safes for high-value items. The Louisville store said it had security cameras and motion detectors.
Nevertheless, thieves found vulnerable areas. At Mahan’s shop, the only remaining glass — in the door at the front — was smashed to get inside.
Will the card craze go away? Don’t count on it
There’s staying power in trading cards, but the values have fluctuated.
“Cards have been around since 1888,” Mahan said. “Depressions, recessions, they’ve never gone away. They’re very intrinsically American.”
The market may settle down some; Mahan, for instance, thought a lot of common cards were overpriced in recent months. Some of those prices are dropping. But otherwise, he thinks the “card boom” is here to stay.
“I don’t think it’ll ever go back to where it was pre-pandemic,” he said.
As the mania continues, Lexington is set to welcome the “Kentucky Card Collector Con” next month. The event will be at the Central Bank Center. It’s intended “to combine all the elements of card collecting culture together under one roof,” according to the event’s website.
The event is being organized by Geek Inc., which also sets up Lexington Comic Con. The Card Collector Con will feature vendors that deal in vintage and modern sports cards; Pokemon and other collectible card games; collectible non-sports cards; fan apparel; streetwear; and sneakers.
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 9:02 AM.