Shop Numbers
People Sell Cards Back More Than They Keep
Every card we sell, we also buy back. That is not a footnote in the business — it is a real, staffed part of it, with its own published ladder: sell a card back and we pay you 70% to 90% of its market value, the exact percentage set by how much you have bought from us before. We publish that range because a shop that hides its buyback rate is a shop that does not want you doing the math before you pull.
We decided to do our own math. Not "how much do we pay," which is already public — but "what do people actually do." So we looked at every pull where someone has actually made a call: keep the card, or sell it back.
175 came back to us. 19 stayed. Measured against the live ledger on September 25, 2026 — a dated snapshot, not a running total, so read it as what happened up to that point rather than a permanently current figure.
That is about 9 out of every 10 decided pulls going straight back into the loop.
That number surprised us, and we are not going to pretend it did not
The easy version of this business is a slide deck that says "customers build collections." Our own ledger says something different: most people who pull a card here are not building a shelf. They are ripping, deciding fast, and taking the cash — or the store credit — over the cardboard. Nineteen people out of a hundred and ninety-four decided the card itself was worth more to them than 70 to 90 cents on the dollar today. Everyone else took the money.
We could spin that as a problem. We do not think it is one. A card shop that only worked for people planning to keep everything would be a much smaller shop than the one we actually run, and it would be lying about what most of its own customers want. What our ledger says is that Waffles gets used more like a place to rip and immediately decide, and less like a place people warehouse cardboard for ten years. Both are legitimate ways to spend money on trading cards. We would rather tell you which one this actually is than let the marketing imply the other.
The number that makes it look less like a fluke
If ripping-and-selling-back were just people cutting losses on cards that turned out to be junk, we would expect it to correlate with people leaving. It does not. Roughly 73% of everyone who has ever paid us once has paid us again (also measured September 25, 2026). That is not the behavior of people who feel burned by the buyback rate — that is the behavior of people who ripped a pack, sold a card back, and came back to do it again. The sell-back rate and the repeat-purchase rate are, in our own numbers, the same story told twice: this product is closer to a fast loop than a one-time transaction, on both sides of the till.
What this actually means if you are deciding what to do with a pull
Nothing above is a reason to sell back a card you actually want. If you pull something you would genuinely rather own than cash out — hold it. Nobody's ledger entry should talk you out of the one card you actually wanted. But if you have been assuming that most people who rip packs are quietly building a binder somewhere, our own numbers say that is not the median experience on this shop. The median experience is: rip it, decide in the moment, and take the sell-back. That is worth knowing before you buy your first pack, not after — it is closer to what you are actually signing up for than "collect them all" copy would tell you.
We would rather you know that going in than find out after your first pull that everyone around you seems to be selling theirs back and wonder if you are missing something. You are not. That is just what the ledger says most people do here.
Curious what determines your buyback percentage? Here's the honesty page where every rate we quote is pulled straight from the code that enforces it — not retyped here, so it cannot drift from what you are actually offered at the till.