They paid me a lot, but I hated it when I dug into the numbers. Once I saw how much customers were spending I noped out of that industry. The “whales” were spending easily 10-20k a week on cards, and way more when new products launched.

There were people who would group up and go in together, but that’s not who I’m talking about — these were individual people who spend all day buying packs hoping to strike it big — they had massive gambling addictions.

I don’t think regular collectors realize how many people get a cut before they can even profit off the card. When someone does nail a high dollar card they have to get it graded, then they take it to an auction house who keeps the bulk of the money just because they know the rich buyers. Because the packs are so expensive at the high end people buy them in groups, and that’s how we made our premiums.

Watch King of Collectibles on Netflix. I was in that field and in those circles. Look what Goldin tried to do to Logan Paul to try and trick him into selling his charzard for cheap — he talked him into losing a quarter million dollars then goes “want to sell me your charzard now?” Logan isn’t a great guy, but you can see how everything Goldin did was premeditated to make Logan feel like shit and less confident so he’d sell.

It makes me even sadder hearing about how Pokémon cards are instantly selling out to scalpers now. Gotta get those kids hooked early I guess. Plus the profit margins are even slimmer after scalping. You’ve basically got to convince buyers they’re lucky and will hit that big win instead of throwing more cash at their much more likely negative value buys.

I worked with guys with phds in economics trying to optimize just how much value they could extract on this.

I’m sure anyone reading this by now thinks I’m an awful human, and yeah I probably am.

I did quit after a relatively short tenure in that field. At the time it was really easy to pretend the average buyer is only buying a few packs and it was all just for fun, plus you’d hear stories about some kid making a ton of money from some rare card and helping their poor family. It made it easy to pretend it was okay and look the other way, but it’s like those an orphan crushing machine type stories, the whole thing was entirely unnecessary and more people lost money than ever will be helped.

I’ve only worked much much more socially responsible jobs since, I only take a job if I feel it serves some good now. That doesn’t undo the bad shit I did though.

And my advice to everyone out there: if you want to collect things, collect only for yourself. You will not get rich, and buying expensive things to collect is just feeding a system that only builds gambling addictions.