- I had asked mr friend Ryan to pick up one of the Topps Now NPB cards - Natsuki Takeuchi - for me. He was willing to do it but pointed out that not only did the card cost 1243 yen but there was a 550 yen shipping fee as well! I told him the webpage for the card said there was "free economy shipping". He said, yeah, it says that but when he went to check out, it told him shipping was 550 yen for a total of almost 1800 yen. We decided to have him hold off on ordering it and give Topps a chance to fix the problem. I discovered this evening that Topps "fixed" the problem by removing the "free economy shipping" text from the webpage. So they're serious about charging 550 yen for shipping. I'm struggling to find the words to describe how insane this is. Epoch has been doing on demand cards in Japan for seven years now and has charged 500 yen per card the entire time. That 500 yen includes shipping. So Topps is attempting to break into the same market in Japan with cards that cost more than twice as much as the existing ones BEFORE you take into account the shipping charge which, by the way, is MORE than the price of an Epoch One card. Am I getting this right?
- I had not noticed the other day that the seven cards that Topps had for sale were numbered from 1 to 8 with #3 missing. #3 is no longer missing as yesterday Topps added a card for Hotoka Yamakawa that will be on sale until April 25th, two days later than the other seven cards.
- Topps is also now selling a 30 card Topps Now team set for the Samurai Japan team that took on Team Europe back at the beginning of March. Unlike the two previous Topps Now Samurai Japan team sets, Topps will not ship this one overseas. The set cost 8800 yen (about $56) and domestic shipping in this case is free. The set contains a number of stars including Munetaka Murakami, Kensuke Kondoh, Sosuke Genda and Chusei Mannami. I'm particularly excited about the fact that it includes cards of the three collegiate players - pitchers Yumeto Kanemura and Yuto Nakamura and outfielder Misho Nishikawa. There haven't been any baseball cards of Japanese collegiate players since the last time the Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set included memorabilia cards for the collegiate national team in 2020 and no Japanese produced cards since BBM's last Tokyo Big Six in 2013. The cards will be on sale until May 16th.
- FedEx dropped off an unexpected package at my house a couple days ago. I was kind of puzzled about who it was from - I really didn't think I'd be getting Zippy Zapped again so soon. It turns out it was a package from Topps - they'd sent me a parallel card for one of the Topps Now Samurai Japan Asian Professional Baseball Championship cards they were selling back in November. It was a nice surprise. They'd sent me some parallels last year for the Topps Now cards for the friendlies against Australia but it had been so long since I'd gotten these cards that I had given up all hope of getting any parallels. Maybe this means I'll get a parallel or two from the team set like I did last year. Here's the card they sent me - it's #25/25:
2 comments:
"I really didn't think I'd be getting Zippy Zapped again so soon"
*Grins menacingly*
I almost left a comment on a recent post of yours about how I was looking forward to getting those cards in another dump from you but I thought it would be kind of rude. I never want to sound ungrateful or that I expect future dumps from you.
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