Sold almost a 1,000.00 worth of sports cards on Sunday, which turned my normally slowest day my busiest day of the week, which helps pull up the average.

I stumbled across this phenomenon. A couple of years ago, when Fleer went bankrupt, I decided that maybe sports cards had finally hit bottom and they might be worth trying to bump up again. I began to order boxes, but since I had consolidated my space for packs, I decided to keep them as unopened boxes until space opened up for them.

I fully expected the higher diversity to help sell packs. Packs have the best margin for us, since singles only sell if they are super, superstars and boxes are so expensive, that I am forced to drop the margin in order to sell them.

But I decided that I would try to get a minimum 35% margin, (which sucks), and try to boost that margin by buying clearane as often as possible, and hope for a 40% margin over all. (Not great, but better.)

Funny thing happened. Packs didn't, and don't sell. An occasional young family will buy a pack of Topps or Upper Deck, but not enough.

And, though it took a while, boxes began to sell. I'd maybe have only 2 or 3 active buyers -- IN TOTAL! -- but they were the bulk of my sales. It was enough to carry a larger selection.

So the next thing I tried was some of the more expensive boxes: 300.00, 400.00, and 500.00 boxes. Those are what sold yesterday.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Card boxes are filled with bells and whistles -- autographs, memorabilia, short print fancy cards, rookie cards, and so on. It actually make much more sense to save up and spring for a 100.00 box than it does to buy a couple of packs a day for a month.

It is also further proof that kids aren't my customers. (Before you tell me that it's too bad the kids have been priced out of the market -- I don't agree. There have always been cheap packs for the kids. They don't want them. They want the expensive packs.)

Biggest problem with sports cards is, when they don't sell, they don't sell at all. I had a month recently that was less than 15% of last years average. But just a few months before that, I had a month that was 400% of average. Pretty hard to predict.