Let's bust some junk wax! Sort of.

In my quest to check out every card store in the Bay Area, I came across one located here in San Francisco, in the Nob Hill area.

I first visited in late September, and just took a quick look in the store. It's not really a card store, more of a general goods place, with lots of stock piled up that's at least 15 years old. I'm not sure how a place like this survives, unless they already own the building and live upstairs. Maybe the guy is just slowly selling off his stuff after retiring for some extra income. I'm not even exactly sure how the guy came to own his inventory - cards and everything else.

Keeping with the old-stock theory, I don't believe I saw any packs or boxes from 1995 on. Perhaps the card store stopped existing as such because of the strike. The packs still carry 1994 prices. I enquired about a box of mid-90s Ultra (of which there were several piled on the floor behind the counter), and he came back with $50. Yeeeeeah. I was hoping for some cheap older wax, but it wasn't going to happen.

I grabbed two packs of 1994 Select, one from each series. Each pack has 12 cards, with on average two inserts per box. Now, if you want an idea of how old this product is, the guy behind the counter literally wiped a layer of dust off the pack before handing it to me.

Series 1 $1.50 per pack:

 I forgot what these cards looked like until I opened them. The dual-photo fronts with a strip of gold foil isn't horrible, but it looks a lot like the horizontal version of 1994 Upper Deck. How did that happen?

 The regular cards in the set are all horizontal, with rookies and checklists vertical. That wasn't a bad pack as far as player selection goes.

Series 2 $1.25 per pack:

 More horizontals. Rickey Henderson, with the A's in 1994, is the highlight in the pack.

Gerald Williams is the best "prospect" of the three pulled between the two packs, even he played 57 games the two seasons prior to 1994.

There were some cards in a couple small display cases to go along with all the old wax. The prices were all over the place. Some cards seemed to be at quite a bargain, while others were still stuck in the 1990s high-price bubble. It's not a place to visit on a regular basis, and for that matter it's not a good source of cards, but I may have to go back again once more to have a better look at the available packs and singles. Who knows, with all the 80s stuff laying around I could find a good deal.