What Exactly Is “Community Gum”?

I recently parleyed my contest winnings at Community Gum into a bit larger trade, including Twins from a box of O-Pee-Chee cards. I won’t bother to show the Twins cards here, as most were featured on their website. I may singlehandedly get Jon over his Maddux collection goal for the year.

But like you all, I have often wondered exactly what IS Community Gum? Well, as a member of the Ministry of Information Retrieval (“Be Safe; Be Suspicious”), I did some digging and uncovered the following details:

Community Gum is located in a modest building at an undisclosed location in the Chicago metro area. Besides Jon and Andy, there are seven additional full-time workers, well paid men and women hired from the area’s underprivileged and unemployed. They and their staff spend the day opening, sorting, and organizing packs and boxes of cards, as well as packaging and addressing trades and contest winnings, and all have some modicum of blogging skill and take their turns creating the posts on the website. The “gum” part of Community Gum is interesting. When packs are opened that contain gum, that pink chewy substance is meticulously stacked and lovingly carried to the back room, where a converted wine refrigerated storage case is used to store them in optimum temperature and humidity. After the weekly Friday contest idea conferences, some of the gum is retrieved as a “way to go!” treat for everyone for a job well done.

Well, it’s possible that not all of the information is entirely accurate, but you get the idea — Jon & Andy have a quality setup, and I enjoyed the trade.