Steven M Young

The eTopps Disaster: A Warning for Every Card Vault in the Hobby By Joe Joe May For more than 20 years, eTopps promised collectors something revolutionary. Buy the card. Leave it in the vault. Trade it. Sell it. Build your portfolio without ever touching the card. Sound familiar? It should. That's essentially the same promise modern vaults make today. PSA Vault. Fanatics Collect Vault. Goldin Vault. PWCC. Different technology. Different companies. Better inventory systems. But at their core, they're built on the same idea: "Trust us to hold your cards." We Did. Many of us trusted eTopps for decades. Some collectors accumulated thousands of cards. We bought them. We traded them. We sold them. We built portfolios. The cards never left Topps' warehouse. Then the program died. Now, years later, collectors are finally trying to get cards they've owned for decades... ...and many of us are still waiting. Some of us paid shipping over a year ago. Not cheap shipping. Ridiculous shipping. We're paying to have our own property returned to us after it sat in someone else's warehouse for twenty years. And we're still waiting. Then came the email. "Sorry... ...it's going to take another couple of months." Again. At this point the delay isn't what concerns me anymore. It's what happened during those twenty-plus years. I Remember a Conversation Back in 2017, I had a conversation with a Topps employee. He told me eTopps was reportedly losing about a million dollars a year, and that the company was looking for a way to shut the program down. I can't independently verify that figure today, and I'm not presenting it as an official Topps statement. But I've never forgotten hearing it. If that was true... What exactly was costing a million dollars every year? A warehouse? Insurance? Inventory management? Technology? Staff? If the cards were simply sitting on shelves... where was all that money going? The Questions Nobody Can Answer Collectors are now discovering that some cards they've owned for decades are simply... "...no longer available." Think about that. You owned the card. You paid for the card. You left it exactly where Topps wanted you to leave it. Twenty years later... it's gone. So naturally collectors start asking questions. What happened? Were cards damaged? Destroyed? Lost? Miscounted? Were original print runs accurate? Were cards accidentally discarded? Did inventory records drift over twenty years? Could employees have removed cards? Were some cards simply never there in the quantities everyone believed? I'm not accusing anyone of any of those things. I'm saying those are the obvious questions collectors ask when they're told something they've owned for decades can no longer be delivered. And so far... I haven't seen those questions answered publicly. Then There's Another Concern... Collectors of late-1990s glossy cards know the word. Bricking. Cards stored tightly together for years can literally fuse together. Separate them and the surfaces peel apart. The cards become damaged. Sometimes ruined. Were eTopps cards protected against that? Were they individually sleeved? Separated? Climate controlled? Inspected? I honestly don't know. But after twenty-plus years in storage... I think it's a fair question. What Makes Modern Vaults Different? To be fair, today's vaults are significantly more advanced. PSA Vault stores primarily graded cards protected in sealed holders. Fanatics Collect uses climate-controlled storage, digital inventory systems, insurance, and integrated marketplaces. They're far more sophisticated than eTopps ever was. That's good. But here's the problem... Technology isn't what failed eTopps. Time did. Companies change. Executives change. Ownership changes. Business priorities change. Twenty years sounds like forever... until it isn't. That's Why I'm Skeptical Today, when you redeem certain Topps products, one option is simple: Leave the card in the Fanatics Vault. Maybe that's the right decision. Maybe it isn't. But after living through the eTopps experience... after paying substantial shipping fees... after waiting over a year... after hearing collectors told cards they owned are "no longer available"... I can't help but ask... What guarantees are there that today's vaults won't face similar challenges twenty years from now? Maybe they won't. I hope they won't. But eTopps probably thought the same thing back in 2002. My Advice? Maybe I'm old-fashioned. Maybe I've become cynical. But my philosophy has changed. If I'm flipping a card tomorrow... a vault makes sense. If I'm investing long-term... Ship me my card. Because ownership isn't seeing your collection on a screen. Ownership is opening your safe... pulling the card out... and knowing exactly where it is. The eTopps story isn't just about delayed shipments. It's a reminder that every collector should ask one simple question before trusting someone else with their collection for decades: "What happens if the vault is still around... but nobody knows where my cards are?"