Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Doing The Right Thing

SCD, or Sports Collectors Digest, has finally decided to listen to the hobby community and dump their biggest advertiser- Coach's Corner.

Here's one sign that the scandal-stained sports memorabilia biz is getting serious about cleaning up its act: Sports Collector's Digest, the hobby Bible, will stop accepting advertising from Coaches Corner, one of its biggest advertisers.

Collectors and memorabilia industry leaders have complained about Coaches Corner for years, saying the autographed balls, game-used bats and other memorabilia offered by the Souderton, Pa., auction house appears fraudulent and doesn't pass the sniff test.

This is a move in the right direction. Many senior collectors have been harping at SCD to do something about their affiliation with Coach's Corner. After all, anybody in the hobby who knows a thing about autographs and memorabilia will tell you to stay away from that auction house and the authenticators affiliated with them.

What's weird, though, is that 2 days before this press announcement I had a email exchange with a marketing guy at Krause Publications (parent firm of SCD) openly questioning why they are still allowing Coach's Corner to advertise there. I would like to think I was the main voice of the collecting community that caused their ejection, but I know that hobbyist more respected than myself have been complaining about Coach's Corner for a very long time.

I am glad to see that Sports Collectors Digest is doing the right thing.

(Hat Tip: Net54Baseball.com)

3 comments:

  1. I think we're getting the tip of the iceberg here. There has to be more to it. SCD has heard the arguements for years - there must be some reason to seemily call off the engagement so abruptly.

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  2. JRJ... you are probably right... I suspect it has a lot to do with some of the other ventures currently being undertaken by Krause Publications; such as the collect.com website and their new auction house... when I corresponded with Krause I plainly said that ethical issues in the industry is well known now and I suspect that SCD's involvement with Coach's Corner would invariably cause harm to these new ventures. I even said to look at REA as an example of good citizenship- they always seem to have the best consignments and get much higher prices because consumers trust them to not act like Coach's Corner or even Mastro.

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  3. Krause seems to be trying to make amends. I know that Bob Lemke is now back into the fold with the standard catalog and now this. Things are slowly changing for the better.

    Maybe the next step is a industry wide code of ethics. Thats something to think about.

    ReplyDelete

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