Just Disappointed

We've have all seen pictures on the internet of people sitting in the card aisle of their local Target or Wal-Mart feeling up packs of cards, sticking them on scales, or sitting on the floor shuffling through the product.  It's a sad sight to see.....

is this guy barefoot?  Ugh.

In my cozy little corner of suburban Raleigh I do occasionally dabble in the retail card aisle of my local Target store.  The Wal-Mart near my house has the worst retail card aisle in the history of retail card aisles.  My retail purchases tend to be small quantities of products that I am not going to put together as a set, or sometimes something that I am not sure about collecting so I dabble first with some retail.

My wife recently sent me to Target to run a quick errand, so after completing the shopping list I walked through the card aisle and picked up a pick of Donruss Optic.  It's a product that I am not going to buy a box of, but I like the looks of some of the cards.  If Panini were a licensed card manufacture I would probably be more willing....

So, I quickly grabbed two packs and checked out.  I went out to my car, opened the first pack, and flipped through the cards.  Pretty nice stuff.  Then I went to open the second pack and.......

I really didn't have to do much to open the pack of cards.  The top of the pack was slit open with a knife, or a razor.  I am not sure how I missed it in Target, probably in too big of hurry, but I felt completely disappointed.  

First off, I ended up getting a couple of nice Cardinals cards out of the packs.  

I pulled two Magnueris Sierra cards.  The colored parallel actually came out of the pack that was cut open, the white base card came out of the sealed pack.  I also ended up with a nice looking Yadier Molina card.....

If only Panini would only make cards of catchers wearing their catchers gear........

Which brings me back to the whole retail pack searching thing.  I know many adults who go into places like Target and Wal-Mart, pick up some retail packs randomly from the card aisle, and open them after buying them.  Sometimes they are really happy, sometimes they are not.   I once had a great blaster box of retail cards.....

I will never forget pulling this card out of a pack at the same Target store where I bought my two packs of Donruss Optic.  You know who else buys a lot of retail packs?  Kids.  I work with kids.  I have given away packs of retail baseball cards in my class.  I have had kids pull really good cards out of packs.  One of my best ever was a 2015 Jeter photo variation card.....

That's a tough pull right there and it made the kids day.  Guess what happened later that week?  Same kid walks into my room with a stack of cards that he and his mom picked up at Wal-Mart.  We sat down before school, flipped through the stack and talked about what cards he liked and what players were his favorites.

More recently, I had a students pull a Luis Gonzalez autograph out of a repack box I had bought and given the packs away.  Nice looking card numbered out of 25.....

After researching Luis Gonzalez, the student is a Yankees fan, they decided that they liked the idea of pulling an autograph, just not Luis Gonzalez.  I brought in a few Yankees autographs and swapped them out for Luis.

I have been on this soapbox before, but there are many adult collectors and not many kid collectors.  It would be nice to attract my kids into baseball card collecting, but having people pack search and wreck the chances of a kid getting a nice card out of a retail pack is reprehensible.

How much does a Luis Gonzalez autograph cost?  Not enough for grown up to sit on the floor of Target and feel up a bunch of packs of cards for an hour.  Just disappointed.