Deal For Schoop Bobble Head Yields A Headache and Extra Cards

I try to keep my blog posts positive, especially when I am discussing trades and deals with fellow collectors.  Most deals end well, I'd say 99.9% of them do, but sometimes, you learn from doing a deal with someone that you are better off declining them in the future.

This leads me to today's post.  On September 6, I paid a guy I know from Facebook and Instagram a sweet price for a Jonathan Schoop bobble head and another bobble head.  He was desperate for money, and after I initially declined his offers for the items, he finally lowered the price to something I just couldn't pass up and I reluctantly said we had a deal.  He was even going to throw in an OMLB ball that I had sent him to graph with, but never ended up using.  Subsequently, communication stopped after the Paypal payment (friends and family, of course) and I wasn't informed that the stuff had shipped in the days that followed.  I messaged him a couple times about a week later to see if he had shipped yet and I got no response.  Finally, he asked me for my address on September 19 and apologized for taking so long to ship.  A couple weeks went by, and still nothing, so I sent a couple messages to see what was going on, and they weren't even opened.  I kept my cool, but I was obviously frustrated, so I finally messaged him on every platform I had followed him on and said that he could just refund me the money and not worry about shipping the goods.  I wanted to end the deal amicably, since I still believed we were friends.  Within a minute of sending the message to refund me the money, he said that his mom had forgotten to ship.  He said on October 6 that he was sending extras to make up for the slow shipment.  Finally, on October 23, I got the package.  Inside the package was the stuff I bought, in good shape, yet, the OMLB wasn't there.

He did add a bag of autographed cards to the shipment, I guess to make up for everything, but has not actually sent me any kind of message since October 6.  I was never rude at all in the transaction, but my thought was that with the ignoring of messages and lack of communication, we probably weren't as good of friends as I thought we were.  That's a real bummer, but honestly, it probably is for the best.

I've known the guy since I started on Instagram, but we have only completed one trade, and it went just as poorly as this one.  I tried to let things go and not let it bother me, but I will not be trading with him any more.  I don't think it will be an issue, since he pretty much stopped talking altogether.  That's a real shame.

So, here are the IP autos that he sent along.  These are all guys in the Orioles minor league system.  Some of them are more promising than others, but they're all nice.  I'm particularly interested in Tanner Scott, for sure, since he is a lefty and can top 100+ MPH.

This Juan Yepez from 2016 Bowman Chrome is a nice card, as well.  I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but it is nice, nonetheless.

Finally, this Bowman Platinum Jonathan Singleton relic auto is also a nice card.  I have an idea what I'll be doing with this, so we'll see.

I just feel bad about this whole deal, though.  With the nominal amount that I sent him, I really shouldn't complain, but I think the lack of communication at all was a slap in the face.  I even thought about sending him some additional money via Paypal to cover the cost of shipping, but then I thought that if it really were that important to him, he would have at least messaged me a lot more than he had been.  The fact that this was the second time this has happened with the same person tells me that I will not be doing any kind of deals with him again.  It's really sad.