The Bowman Blue Wave Debacle

What started out as a fantastic good will gesture by the Topps Company by offering collectors the opportunity to turn-in their wrappers from 2012 Bowman Baseball in exchange for some pretty neat looking Blue and Red Wave refractors. What an amazing concept and great promotion to help push sales of one of their flagship lines.

After months of hype and anticipation for the product, a number of collectors were able to get the product up to 2-full days ahead of it’s scheduled release. With a limited number of packs (10,000) being available to the public, these collectors who received their orders early obviously had the advantage of getting their wrapper redemption fulfilled.

I have become one of the unlucky ones in the whole situation, as I just learned that my packs will go unfulfilled from Topps. Typically, I Would be fine with this, especially in a first come, first serve situation. However, in today’s fully interconnected world, I am reading stories of people who packs were submitted and received well after mine that have already received packs. There are stories of people who received many more packs than they were originally allotted (I have read upwards to 80 additional packs in some instances).

Topps really had an opportunity to make things right with a lot of collectors out there with this promotion, unfortunately, it really shows they have no value for their customers and it was merely a ploy to sell more inventory. The small time buyers and collectors are not treated the same as the big inventory buyers or bulk busters and flippers.

For me, it may take a while for this black eye from Topps to heal, I guess it could mean stepping away from supporting their products through the years like I have done. Hopefully in the future Topps and other companies have a far great plan in place to support all of their customers, especially during promotions like this.

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