It’s Thursday night at Boomtown Sports Cards & Pokeshop on Bandera Road. I’m arriving just 10 minutes before closing time but this San Antonio business doesn’t depend on shoppers inside the store. It’s already made tonight’s sales online. Inside, Boomtown employee Ryan Matthew Mitchell delivers rapid-fire patter to his Facebook Live video audience.
New Wembanyama bobblehead features the Spurs star holding his own bobblehead I really have no idea what I’m watching, or what Mitchell and his audience are reacting to. But I’ve been told this is called a “box break.” It’s the third online box break the store has run today. They may do dozens of these per week. “Tannehill. Dalton Schultz, Houston Texans. We’re just spinning,” Mitchell says. “We got Bengals, Sam Hubbard coming in.
Why some pandemic lifestyle changes stuck with South Texans — and others didn’t And Nava turned a hobby into a business. Earlier in the day, before I got to the store they’d broken a box and found a vintage autographed Steve Young card. This, Nava tells me, should be worth from $600 to $800 — many multiples of the initial investment. Whoever got the San Francisco 49ers for that box break hit the absolute jackpot — if they decide to sell.
Taylor: This is your bitcoin warning However, Nava and his employees, like Mitchell, clearly know they’ve got willing buyers who will enthusiastically pay these prices to satisfy their passion for collectibles. As a hobby and a gamble, I grok the hedonic hit of the buyers. Nava absolutely understands that, for his customers, this is a heady combination of gambling and investing.
Taylor: Fantasy sports, online gambling a disturbing combination Nava shares more about the business side of Boomtown, which opened in January 2022. “It was a dream to have a collectibles store, ever since I was young,” he says. But this passion combined with his frequent box breaks since 2019 to serve his growing online audience had started to take over his house. “So the wife was like, I need you to get this stuff out of here,” he says. “So it gave me permission to open a shop.