>>58274175I wonder how people can so easily enjoy being scammed by gamestop. They never give more than a fraction of the thing's value.
>>58274201PSA is a grading company for collectibles. Their business model is slop, but in they're the company whose grades mean the most for pokemon card investing in terms of value. A graded card is returned to you in a display slab showcasing the card, its grade, and a unique code that you can use to locate on their spreadsheets of existing grades for that particular card. Shows the number of cards with the same grade, and having a low population grade on an already rare card can significantly boost its value.
It's really just scammers scamming scammers who hope to scam scammers, though, since the company holds your items hostage if you don't pay their fees. Fees which are directly connected to, and increased by, the street price of that item and grade. So you pay the base rate + increased hostage fee for the final item which get increased by it having a higher grade, which you then resell to someone else hoping to sell it at a higher price later on. It's the shitshow endgame of speculative investors for card collecting.
The best part? None of the grades even matter. They're literally fake. There's no consistency with any grading company, even the ones that use AI and high tech computer scans, since people crack open their graded slabs and resubmit the cards in hopes of getting a higher score all the time. And it works. It's fucking insane. Everyone in the hobby knows they're meaningless, but they also know it doesn't matter since they can still sell them to each other.
