Calbee Cards are Back, Thank God

 

About a month ago I was complaining that Calbee baseball card chips weren't available in stores like usual this year.  It seemed that heightened popularity due to Japan's WBC success combined with Amazon sellers getting some sort of priority access meant that retail stores had been left in the lurch.  For the first time in many years spring in Japan had arrived without Calbee baseball cards on the shelves.

I'm happy to report that little over a week ago bags finally started to appear in major supermarkets in my neighborhood and I've been able to start buying them on a regular basis again.  Hooray!

Most importantly for me, this means that my kids are getting into it again this year too.  I buy a few bags at a time at the supermarket and keep a stockpile at home. This allows me to randomly say "Hey, want to open some baseball card chips with me?" when the two of them seem to be at a loss for activities to do, or when I'm watching a game on TV and they come into the living room to sit with me.  Both of them have been responding quite positively when I do that and we each open one bag (with three of us that leads to a net total of six cards) and see what we got.  It only eats up a couple of minutes (more if we eat the chips), but its a nice ritual to go through every once in a while as we slowly build up the set over the year.  Doing that with them last year was definitely the most enjoyable experience of my collecting life - including even my own childhood experiences collecting on the playground.  Not being able to do that for the first month of the season had been frustrating, so I'm quite glad to be able to do it again. 

This, more than anything else, is what I really like about Calbee cards.  I complain on here a lot about their repetitive photography and other things, but those are relatively minor quibbles and I really do love them as a card maker.  They are the only one that I know of, in Japan or North America, that has successfully maintained a child-friendly business model in the face of decades of crass, commercial "grown-up-ization" of the baseball card collecting hobby.  While they've certainly made a few adjustments over the years in response to hobby developments - they have insert and chase cards - none of these have led them to seriously jacking up the price or succumbing to the many temptations that I remember seeing card makers in the US falling to in the 90s which really ruined the hobby back then.

So I'm happy to be able to work on another set bag by bag this year.  My son even pulled a Lucky Card yesterday which means we can mail it in for an album.  He was quite excited by that despite being a bit let down by the album he got in the mail last year.  Its just the thrill of hitting a chase card I guess, but I was glad to see that enthusiasm still there.