The Wax is Too Damn High!

As many of you who follow me on social media are aware (and if you’re not, what’s wrong with you?), I recently quit my good paying, secure, government job.  Well, not “quit” but resigned.  After twelve and a half years at the federal government, I decided to take the “Elon Buyout” you may have heard about.  (Getting paid not to work for seven months?  Pretty sweet deal if you can get it.)  

What this means is that I’m now able to comment on topics that, for many reasons, were previously verboten and/or subjected to review by my previous employer.  For example: Do you see how much the price of new wax is going for?

$150 for a box of Series One.  $199 for a box of 2024-25  Heritage High Number.  $135 for 2025 Heritage.  It wasn’t that long ago you could get a box of S1 for $60 or Heritage for $70 the week it went live.  And it’s not as if the product has changed all that much.  What’s the heck is going on here?

Using the magic of The Internet Archive (archive.org), I went back and found the release date prices (or as close to release date as I could find) for a standard Hobby box of Topps Series One and Topps Heritage from 2015 and 2025 from the three major online wax jobbers: Blowout, Steel City, and Dave & Adams.  I then averaged them and got this:

	2015 street price	2015 street price (2025 dollars)	2025 street price
Series One	$59.95	$81.50	$99.95
Heritage	$69.95	$94.74	$119.95

I then adjusted these figures for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics online Inflation Calculator to show how much these 2015 products should cost in today’s 2025 dollars.  The last column was the “street price” for this year’s versions of these products.  

So yeah, we are paying more now, then we were ten years ago.  What’s else is new.  Inflation is a thing (thanks MMTers!).  And yes, The Hobby has seen an influx of “consumers” over the last few years.  Naturally, all that increased demand should result in a higher push in prices.

Let’s look at the street prices of these products on a cost per card (CPC) basis.

	2015	2015 CPC	2015 (2025 dollars)	2015 (2025) CPC	2025	2025 CPC	2015-25 change	Real change
Series One	$59.95	$0.167	$81.50	$0.227	$99.95	$0.416	249.10%	183.26%
Heritage	$69.95	$0.324	$94.74	$0.439	$119.95	$0.625	192.90%	142.37%

A Series One Hobby box has a third fewer cards in than ten years ago: (36 packs of ten for a total of 360 cards then versus twenty packs of twelve for 240 cards now.)  Also, if you haven’t noticed, 2025 Heritage has one fewer card per pack than last year.  

On a cost per card basis the price of a Series One Hobby box has gone from around 17 cents per card in nominal terms and 23 cents in real (e.g. inflation adjusted) terms ten years ago to around 42 cents today

– an increase of almost 250 percent in nominal terms and 183% in real terms.  For Heritage those figures are almost double (193%) in nominal terms, and 142% in real terms.  

You don’t need to be an economist with a graduate degree from one of the better Econ departments out there to know something ain’t right.

I have my hypotheses as to why this is so, but I’m not yet confident in stating them.  Yes, exclusive licensing is one of them.  But then again, I do remember paying around $55-$60 for a Series One Hobby box in the early 2010s – after the Topps MLB exclusive license went into effect.  Obviously, with only two products and two years’ worth of data, this dataset is not nearly as robust as I’d like, and there’s only so much pricing data I can scrape off of archive.org. Since I have a lot of free time on my hands, I will continue to investigate and keep you all updated as to my progress.  If anyone else wants to help out (e.g. you’re a dealer and have access to years of pricing data, or are a fellow economist/social scientist and wants to provide feedback), I’d appreciate it.  

XXXX

It’s April and you know what that means.  Time to gather your paperwork, check and double-check your figures, and submit to an audit.  No, not a tax audit.  But a want list audit.

I’m in the process of consolidating my collection.  Thanks to moves, my collection has been scattered across multiple locations.  The bulk of my collection was in my parent’s house in South Jersey, and remained there after I moved to Virginia in 2009.  But when my parents retired and sold their house, I had to find a place to stash it all, and a one-bedroom apartment wasn’t going to cut it.  Fortunately, my uncle just bought a house in South Jersey, and provided me his basement, which is where most of my collection has remained.  

Until now.  I’ve rented a storage unit and am slowly beginning to move – one carload at a time – my collection out of my uncle’s basement and combining it with the rest of my collection.  This also means, inserting cards I’ve bought over the years, into the sets I’ve retrieved from the basement.

This has led me to discover many discrepancies between what’s on my want list and what I actually have.  Sets that I thought were finished, are now one or two cards short, and cards I’ve bought recently, were cards I already had.  So, over the next couple of weeks, I’m doing something I probably should have done years ago: A complete audit of my want list.

This is probably as good as time as ever for you to do the same. 

XXXX

My first thoughts when I first saw 2025 Topps Series One Celebration, was “Are they really bringing back Opening Day?”  A kid-centric product with mascot inserts?  Celebration must be Opening Day under a new name, I thought.  But the more I looked into this product, the more I felt like Fred from the Scooby Doo gang.

You remember how just about every Scooby Doo episode goes, right?  The gang pulls into town in their psychedelic stoner van where some monster is terrifying the locals.  Scooby and Shaggy are blitzed out of their minds on “Scooby Snacks” while Fred, Daphne, and Velma are all suspicious.  The gang splits up with Scooby and Shaggy getting into their usual hijinks.  Velma loses her glasses, Daphne gets stuck and needs to be rescued, and Fred, is, well Fred – the do-nothing ascot-wearing fop who, naturally, is the leader.  

Somehow, they manage to capture the monster, solve the mystery, and restore order to the town.  Then, right at the end of the episode, Fred pulls the villain’s mask off only to reveal the sketchy-looking guy introduced in Act One was behind it all along.  

And he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.      

The more I pull the mask off Series One Celebration, the more I realized it’s just a rehash of Series One, but with Opening Day’s old inserts.  That’s all it is.  At least with Opening Day, all the base cards are marked and the checklist is condensed.  Not here, the bulk of Celebration is, quite literally, the exact same 350-card base set you all just bought a month ago.  

And Topps would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling collectors.   

Seriously, what is Celebration supposed to be and who is it for?  If it’s for kids, then is it really wise to release it exclusively in the Mega Box format (16 packs), and charge $50?  I know some kids have a lot of money these days, but I don’t think most have $50 burning a hole in their pockets.  Is Topps going to keep rereleasing the same 350-card product over and over now?  (Yeah, I know, they kind of do that now, with the many iterations of Chrome.) I never thought I’d say it, but I’d rather have Opening Day.

XXXX

That’s it for you this month.  If you have any questions, comments, trade offers, or if you want to help me out on my pricing project, you can slip into my DMs, or shoot me an e-mail.  

Keep on rockin’ in the free world … and stay hydrated.