Night Owl Cards

It's no secret that collation for trading card sets sucks and has basically sucked for the last 25 years. I believe I've mentioned this before, but I don't remember pulling two of the same card in the same pack until Upper Deck came along. So I've been blaming them for turning a periodic frustration into an expected occurrence for the last few decades. I am so used to the collation issues of just about every product on the market that I have certain expectations when I buy packs. For example, if I already own a fair amount of a certain set -- and by "fair amount" I mean at least 30 percent -- then when I buy a pack of that product, I expect a certain amount of duplicates. That shouldn't be so, but that's what I expect. This has played out so often for me over the years as I have one-third finished sets everywhere, particularly from the last two or three years. Yesterday, I stopped at Walmart because I had spotted on the Twitter that there we...

The Kmart in my town is closing. This was a long time coming. Kmarts all over the country have closed or been in disrepair for years. My Kmart, while almost completely empty just about every day, kept itself up and was worth visiting just to get away from the atrocity ... er, mass of humanity at Walmart and sometimes Target. It had also recently emerged as a baseball card option. So I'm going to miss that, too. When I saw some of those poor souls displaying signs proclaiming "up to 75% off!" by the side of the very busy road the other day, I knew I had to visit Kmart one last time, if only to see if there were any baseball cards discounted. There were. As I walked in, I saw several bins containing a variety of unrelated small items. I spied some 2016 Topps sticker books immediately. I rummaged around a bit more in the nearby bin and spotted several 36-card fat packs of 2016 Topps, Series 2. Each one was a buck. That is too good of a deal to pass up. And th...