Photo by Neidy Gutierrez / SOC Images.
I was introduced to the trading card community through “Yu-Gi-Oh!” as an early teen around 2003.
Back then, pulling rare cards was even rarer because of money and card duels, where winners won a card of their choice, forcing me to give up all of my good pulls. This ultimately made me stop the chase.
But it wasn’t until February 2025 that I somehow found my way back to it—through Bodega Cards.
Bodega Cards is “the corner store for all things trading cards.” The shop came to the Jersey City Heights in 2022 after taking over a corner store that had been there since the 1970s. And though it’s unclear how many people return to trading cards as an adult—or a millennial or Gen Z’er to be specific—Pete, Charlie and Justin, the team at Bodega Cards, told Slice of Culture that they just want to share a piece of their childhood love with the rest of the community.
“I think the most important role that Bodega Cards has in Jersey City and in our local collecting community is providing an outlet for people to come meet with each other, trade with each other, share with each other and then educate themselves,” Pete, the owner of the card shop, told Slice of Culture.
“… So we like to be the center of the community where we host a trade night [and] people come in that they haven’t seen in a minute… Collecting can be very isolated. I know a lot of my collecting I do online and you just don’t interact with people. So that we wanna change that here where you’re now, it’s a social activity. You’re seeing your friends or other like-minded people that also collect.”
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Nostalgia In A Pack
Pete, Justin and Charlie all got into trading cards when they were kids.
Pete, a lifelong Jerseyan, grew up collecting with his dad and brother. Every weekend was like a treat when visiting their local card shop and grabbing hockey card packs to open.
Across the water, Justin was starting his collection at five years old thanks to Mary Arnold Toys, a beloved local toy store, located at 1178 Lexington Avenue in New York. He described the first box he got like it was yesterday: an NBA Hoops box with Kevin Durant on the front of it. And he kept building his collection, grabbing a pack a day, but only as long as he did well in school.
More up north, Charlie, who grew up in Massachusetts, opened his first box of baseball cards in 1999 with his younger brother, thanks to his father who bought one every Friday after work. He also remembered the box clearly: the 1999 Topps Series 1. He and his brother spent the summer completing the set and putting the cards in binders, but what really gave him the “collecting bug” was pulling his favorite players.
Modern trading cards originated in the 1800s and were packaged with tobacco or candy products.
The most famous and valuable trading card ever is the T206 tobacco card featuring Honus Wagner, an MLB player who played shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates between 1897 and 1917. With only 50 known cards known to be in circulation, the pack of cigarettes likely cost 10 to 20 cents in 1909.
In 2022, a Honus Wagner card sold for $7.25 million, the most expensive card to ever be sold. Topps was a chewing company in 1952, one of its inserts being a 1952 Mickey Mantle. A pack of chewing gum at that time cost 1 cent, and in 2022, it sold for $12.6 million.
Not limited to just sports cards, when first released in October 1996, Pokèmon cards were instantly popular, causing mass hysteria.
In 2020, it was very popular to stream pack openings of sealed cards. One of the more popular cards is “First Edition Shadowless Holographic Charizard,” a 1999 card that sold for $420,000.
And while the trading card business has seen its ups-and-downs, not everyone keeps up with the chase their whole lives.
Charlie got out of the hobby while he was in college. It wasn’t until he started working and got his own paychecks that the “collecting bug” started to bite. He started opening packs again between 2017 and 2018.
According to a 2021 study by Civic Science, roughly 43% of the population has or used to have at least some trading cards, even if they weren’t collectors. And whether that sticks with them or not, Bodega Cards will still be there, sitting at the corner of John F. Kennedy Boulevard and Congress Street, to alleviate any “collecting bug.”
“I tell people all the time, that if you were ever into it as a child, that piece of you that was into the collecting or the opening of packs is still there,” Charlie smiled.
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‘A Community Barbershop’ For Hobbyists
Pete knew he always wanted to open his own card shop.
He eventually moved out of his Morristown home and into Hoboken, where he spent “a lot of time” in Jersey City while living in Hoboken for 15 years. One day he walked past the then bodega and there it was—an opportunity for his dream to come true.
He immediately thought, “We’re just gonna make it Bodega Cards.”
And in 2022, that’s what it became.
Of the many customers who started to make their way in, were Justin and Charlie. Justin was taking a gap year from working another job and one day saw a job opening from a Bodega Cards Instagram ad and he added it up: “I love sports cards, [I can] just work here.”
“And the rest is history,” he smiled.
Charlie—who was now out of Massachusetts and in Jersey City while attending grad school in New York—came by the shop a few times where he also met Justin. Charlie came across a different Instagram ad that they were looking for somebody to work a few hours and he thought “it was just the perfect job.”
“Every time I’ve been in the bodega, it has a real sort of community barbershop kind of vibe. There’s always people chatting about sports, we’re watching tv. It is just a real positive environment,” Charlie said.
Justin added, “I think we’re a staple in Jersey City for all things trading cards, whether it’s Pokémon, whether it’s card supplies, whether it’s boxes, singles, whether it’s snacks. We got tons of snacks at the bodega, but we’re here for it all.”
Now, Justin, the store manager, and Charlie, their live breaker, kick it alongside Pete.
Inside the Bodega, there are so many more trading cards than previously known.
It’s not just the four major sports, it now includes collegiate sports, wrestling cards from WWE and AEW, golf cards and UFC cards. And now expanding to non-sports, there’s also pop culture cards from Marvel, Harry Potter and other popular IPs—emphasizing that there’s a trading card for everyone.
Famous faces have visited Bodega Cards like Gunther from WWE, a former world heavyweight champion; entrepreneur and VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vee, Texas Rangers’ third baseman Josh Jung and Adoree’ Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles, but was previously on the New York Giants.
With so many selections, if you ask the team to choose must-haves from the shop, they’d say:
Pete: “Packs and Snacks”
“Something we have at the bodega is called Packs and Snacks. So you come in here, you grab an Arizona iced tea, you grab your favorite snack and you grab a couple packs and you rip ’em open. That’s what I would recommend if you’re a first-time visitor at the Bodega. I would also strike up a great conversation with some of our staff here, Justin or Charlie, who are wise beyond their years and super knowledgeable about anything having to do with trading cards.”
Justin: Yoohoo
“The Yoohoo’s pretty good. That’s definitely up there.”
Charlie: Freebies and a Snickers
“I think some of the things that you have to grab when you come in is ask us for the free stickers. Our man Pete is an incredible graphic designer and we work with some incredible designers. We have awesome free stickers. Also, we have free packs for kids every day… of Pokemon, baseball, basketball, football [and] soccer. All you have to do is ask politely. I’m [also] a big fan of the Snickers bars.”
But the team told Slice of Culture that what’s more important to them is the community that they’ve built and the need to support local hobby shops.
You can find a Pokémon “Destined Rivals Elite Trainer Box” at Target or a 2024-2025 “Panini Prizm Basketball Blaster Box” at Best Buy—if you’re fast enough—but you can’t ask what a booster pack is or how much your full-art foil is worth. If you get it at Bodega Cards, you could ask Pete, Justin or Charlie plus another “million questions.”
“The heart of the collecting community will always be the local card store,” Pete nodded. “… I think the educational resource that we are as a local hobby shop is just invaluable for people that are getting into the hobby. And if we want to keep growing this beautiful thing, you have to educate people and get them excited about what’s happening.”
“The shop has become sort of a meeting place for people who are into this hobby and live around the Jersey City/Hoboken area to come together, trade cards with each other, talk shop, argue about who’s better: LeBron or Michael Jordan,” Charlie added.
“We’ve been able to build a really incredible community of people, [of] kids, who are five to men who are 80 years old and everyone in between… One of the reasons it draws me so much to it is the variety of different types of people who are into it.”
The Next Pull
If you’re a collector and looking for more specifics, Series 2 of Topps Baseball is set to release in the upcoming weeks. There will also be a varsity of products from the NBA and NFL, while Fanatics will eventually own the exclusive license for the two major leagues, but at the moment Panani still has the rights for the sports.
While Fanatics doesn’t own the license, they have signed athletes such as Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams, Victor Wembenyama, LeBron James, Jayson Taytum and Kevin Durant. The autographs of these athletes are the top selling point. Panani has the official license, which may be more valuable to collectors.
But if you haven’t been able to stop by Bodega Cards before, the shop has a number of “pretty cool things” planned for the summer.
They will have their own ice cream flavor in collaboration with Jersey-owned Milk Sugar Love, located in Hamilton Park in Jersey City; a 2025 “Topps Series 2” rip party on Wednesday, June 11 from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.; and more to be announced.
Looking ahead, the team wants to continue building out their community with customers who are genuine fans of the hobby and “keep coming back.”
“I had so many good memories as a kid with my dad and my brother, that I wanna give that to the next generation of kids [who] collect a place [where] they can come with their parents on the weekends on a Saturday morning and it’s the thing they’ve been looking forward to all week and opening that pack and sorting their favorite players,” Pete said.
“That’s the stuff I really loved about collecting and I want that to be in the kids of this generation’s lives.”
