CGC has put its grading intake behind the counter at 20 FYE stores. The announcement came on September 25, four days after ICv2 reported that PSA had done the same thing with 50 Lids stores, a program this blog covered as CASE #0335. Two major card graders turned national retail chains into grading drop-off points inside a single week.

The two programs look alike from the outside. Set side by side, they do not overlap anywhere. None of the 20 cities CGC named appears on PSA's own list of Lids locations.

What CGC Announced

CGC's post, dated September 25, says it is expanding "its network of Official Submission Centers to include For Your Entertainment (FYE) stores in the US." Each participating store "can help those collectors submit their TCGs, sports cards, and non-sports cards to CGC for authentication, grading, and encapsulation services."

No grading happens in the store. "Submissions will be shipped with insurance to CGC's headquarters in Sarasota, Florida," the announcement says, and after grading they "are shipped back to the FYE location where they were submitted (again with insurance) to be returned to submitters."

CGC says 20 FYE locations are taking part to start and that "additional FYE locations are expected to be added as Official Submission Centers soon." It gives no number for that expansion. For scale, the same post describes FYE as operating "more than 120 locations in 33 states."

Where the Slab Comes Back

The drop-off step is nearly the same in both programs. The return trip is not.

PSA's own PSA GO page lays out five steps. The customer submits through the PSA GO app at the Lids counter, and a Lids employee packages and ships the cards. Step five reads: "Once grading is complete, your items will be encapsulated and packaged safely. Then they'll be shipped back to you or the PSA Vault, depending on your selection."

CGC's graded cards go back to the FYE store where they were dropped off. A PSA GO customer walks into a Lids once. A CGC customer at FYE walks in twice, once to drop the cards off and once to pick up the slabs.

The two companies also fit the new counters into their existing networks differently. CGC made FYE stores part of its Official Submission Center network. PSA pitches PSA GO to collectors who lack one: "Don't have an official PSA Submission Center near you?" its page asks.

Two Maps That Do Not Touch

PSA's location list is a PDF linked from the PSA GO page. It gives 51 addresses in 23 states, one of them Lids' corporate headquarters in Indianapolis. CGC's announcement names its 20 stores by city, grouped under 13 state headings.

We compared the two lists city by city, and not one city is on both. Nine states have locations on both lists. Montclair, Montebello and Riverside are CGC's California cities. PSA's twelve California addresses run from Commerce and West Covina to Rancho Cucamonga, Temecula and Roseville. In Texas, CGC went to El Paso and Grapevine. PSA's Texas stores are in Dallas, Houston, Corpus Christi and San Antonio.

Four of CGC's states have no PSA GO location at all:

  • Michigan — Auburn Hills
  • North Carolina — Concord and Greensboro
  • Pennsylvania — Lancaster
  • Virginia — Roanoke

It runs the other way too. PSA's list reaches 14 states where CGC named no FYE store, including Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.

Analysis: Neither company has said how it chose its stores, and the pattern has a simple reading. Each grader chose a partner whose stores it did not have to lease, and each partner brought its own store map. ICv2 noted that most Lids stores sit in shopping malls. CGC's cities come from FYE's map. No city on the two lists has both counters.

What the Counter Does Not Change

Card Grading News, which covered CGC's announcement on September 27, notes that "store intake does not change CGC's service-level queue once the order hits Sarasota." It advises collectors to confirm with the store which CGC service level they are ordering and what intake fees and turnaround the store quotes before leaving cards.

That is also the right way to read PSA GO. Neither program adds grading capacity. Both change where a card enters the system. On PSA's side, the September 22 Backlog Tracker entry puts the active backlog at about 9 million units (CASE #0338). CGC says it has certified more than 15 million cards since 2020.

Analysis: CASE #0338 read PSA's September as three moves, each reaching the collector earlier in the decision to grade. CGC's FYE deal is the same kind of move by a competitor. It moves the drop-off point into a store the collector may already shop in. CGC has not described it in those terms, and nothing in either announcement suggests one company was responding to the other.

Verdict: CGC's 20 FYE counters and PSA's Lids counters do the same job at the front end. They send slabs back to different places, and they share no city. Until either company adds stores, a collector's nearest counter decides which grader is on offer.

Confidence note: The FYE program's terms, its 20 locations, the return-to-store shipping and FYE's store count are from CGC's own announcement (September 25, 2026). The PSA GO steps and the "official PSA Submission Center" wording are from PSA's PSA GO page, and the Lids addresses from PSA's linked location list, both read September 30, 2026. The city and state comparison is this blog's own count of those two lists. The 50-store figure and the program's September 21 report date are from ICv2. Card Grading News (September 27) is the source for the queue and in-store advice. The backlog figure is from PSA's Backlog Tracker as reported in CASE #0338. Passages labeled Analysis are this blog's interpretation, not findings in those sources.