Selling Collectibles and Memories at Mr. D’s

“I’m a millionaire,” said owner Fred S. DiBella. “I’m not a millionaire in cash but I’m a millionaire in cards—I probably have more than a million cards in the store.”

And it all started with a Whopper at Burger King.

“Burger King had a promotion in 1977 that when you purchased a Whopper you get three Yankee baseball cards,” DiBella said. “It interested me, so I went to a couple of flea markets and to dealers selling baseball cards.”

In the same year, DiBella started selling baseball cards at the US 1 Flea Market in New Brunswick and even though he had a job in the insurance business, he later quit in 1980 when he discovered he was making more money selling cards on the weekend.

As the hobby of sports card collecting grew throughout the 1980s, he decided to go full time into the business in 1981 and then opened Mr. D’s Sports Cards & Collectibles soon after in 1986.

DiBella has owned Mr. D’s Sports Cards & Collectibles for more than 25 years, making his business one of the oldest in East Brunswick. He and his business have withstood a slow decline of interest in the market, possibly due to retail and auction kings such as Ebay, and a new generation more inclined to spend time with their cellphones and video game consoles, he said.

“Even though a lot of people are happy I’m here, most of my customers come in and tell me that they’re surprised that I’m still here and that I’m still in business,” DiBella said. “There was a special on CBS where they said (baseball and other sports cards) are worth 20 percent of what they used to be worth, so the hobby is not what the hobby was.”

DiBella said that while he was lucky to have entered the business in the 1980s when the hobby was booming,it was also around the same time when larger businesses and corporations started to realize its lucrative possibilities.

“At one point there were five, six, seven or eight companies producing cards and the market got flooded,” he said “And suddenly the market turned around.”

The effects can still be felt today, he said, in that many of the cards that came out in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s have very little value. And it is up to DiBella to tell his customers that what they had paid $25 for then is no longer worth much today. 

DiBella said that the use of steroids has also adversely affected the market value of certain cards.

“A Mark McGwire rookie card used to be worth $150, and then the steroids came along and you can’t even get $20 for one of them,” he said. “So that hurt the hobby because you had people who spent $150 and bought it as an investment and unfortunately it didn’t pan out.”

But while DiBella routinely competes within a tough and selective market, and with retail auctioneer Ebay, he said there are still customers, who love to look, touch and relive their childhood memories of collecting baseball cards as a child.

“I had a guy in here earlier today for almost an hour and he said it was like a museum,” said DiBella. “He had also purchased some vintage cards from the 1950s that he remembered when he was a child.”

"Like a museum" it certainly is when you first walk into DiBella’s Sports Cards & Collectibles. There are glass panes filled with cards going back to the 1940’s as well as current merchandise interspersed throughout the store.

While DiBella reminisces about times when he ran five Sports Cards & Collectibles Stores and had 80 to 100 customers coming in on a daily basis, he says he continues to have a regular customer base. He has collectors who come in to purchase the newest edition of Topps’ complete baseball card set and others who collect vintage Yankees cards from the 1960s.

“I still have people coming in who have bought the (Topps) set from me from 25 years ago when their kids used to be 10 and now they’re 35 years old,” he said.

He gets current items, such as binders, card holders, and a variety of sports equipment and clothing on a regular basis. He purchases and gets older and vintage merchandise on a daily basis, through private signings, shows and from customers looking to sell or trade their old collections.

Even though DiBella has been in the business for more than two decades, he still remembers instances that surprise and excite him, like when he had bought vintage cards from the 1930s, along with the card’s original wrappings, from a customer.

“He just threw (the wrappers) into the set and it turned out that the wrappers were worth more than the cards because people kept the cards but threw the wrapper away, so they were a lot scarcer,” he said. “And I had no idea myself.”  

DiBella said that being self-employed has a lot of challenges, including being prepared and able to handle putting in a lot of time into your business and not get paid for it. But he also said that passion and a little bit of luck can go a long way.

“I think I got a little lucky because I got into the business at the right time,” he said. “There’s been a tremendous amount of stores that have closed and I’m still here. So obviously I may not be the sharpest pencil but I’m still sharp enough to keep going and I have no plans of moving.”  

Mr. D’s Sports Cards & Collectibles is located at 739 Highway 18 South in East Brunswick. For more information, call 732-257-5447.