If you’re into challenges, try selling sports apparel amid a disrupted sports world.

And try doing that as the retail world continues to be decimated by a surge in online buying that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

J.P. Sports, a well-known and locally owned business that entered the year with four stores and 35 employees, had a shipment of thousands of dollars of spring training stuff arrive in mid-March, which was when the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic began shutting down the nation.

With spring training cut short March 12, with the NCAA Tournament men’s and women’s basketball tournaments canceled, with Major League Baseball’s regular season postponed to July 24 and with some college football conferences having canceled their seasons, J.P. Sports has been bracing for bad to get worse.

It already closed its Port Charlotte location on Jan. 28 because of the retail apocalypse. It followed suit March 26 by shutting down its Edison Mall location for good, because of the pandemic.

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J.P. Sports is now down to two locations: At Gulf Coast Town Center and in Cape Coral at the base of the Coralwood Shopping Center, at the corner of Del Prado Boulevard and the Veterans Parkway flyover.

“We had to make decisions,” owner John Peery said. “Do we continue to have the payroll with nobody coming into the stores? The other thing is, they wanted full rent. If you’re only doing 30, 40, 50 percent of your normal sales, you just can’t handle the full rent.

“When Fort Myers shut down spring training, that was tough. We had just brought in $10,000-to-$30,000 of spring training apparel. The writing was on the wall for us.”

J.P. Sports has cut from 35 to seven employees.

But it’s also looking at one silver lining. A slice of its business has grown, spreading like, well, like a virus.

First the bad: With get-togethers and watch parties at sports bars on hiatus, there are fewer customers looking for team-emblazoned T-shirts, trinkets, etc.

The shutdowns of March and April also meant the stores had trouble receiving shipments of goods, most of which come from China.

“Anything to do with plastic comes from overseas,” Peery said. “So when they shut down the port, everything dried up. We couldn’t get anything. Everybody was in the same boat.”

That same problem of receiving shipments, however, helped to create a boom in another part of J.P. Sports’ business. That of sports trading cards.

With shipments of new cards delayed, customers began buying out the bulk of the store’s older inventory.

By the time the new cards did arrive, pent-up demand surged. So did prices.

This summer marked a revolution of sorts, especially in baseball and basketball trading cards.

“In general, people who were sitting home were opening the stuff like madmen,” John Peery said. “They were buying all this stuff, they were opening everything. That took the market to the next level. So there was really nothing left to open. The only thing left to open was the new stuff. And that has quadrupled in value.”

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A $53 box of baseball cards from a year ago now runs about $280. The pricing all depends on the brand, and it fluctuates like the price of a barrel of oil.

NBA cards have soared in demand and in price. J.P. Sports had just two kinds of basketball cards for sale in the Cape Coral store. Spectra Panini cost $369.99 for four cards in a pack. Obsidian cost $549.99 for a box of cards with seven cards per box.

Topps products such as Luminaries, include one, autographed card per box and cost $329.99.

Although the store has been wiped out of most NBA cards, it still has an assortment of lower-priced baseball cards.

“We’re trying to get stuff for the kids at $5 per pack, but the guys keep coming in and scooping it up,” Peery said of the basketball cards. “We’re trying to keep it competitive.”

Zion Williams, R.J. Barrett and Ja Morant are talented NBA rookies, and collectors want their cards. Jolean Peery, who is the general manager, said she cannot keep those rookie cards in her Cape Coral store. They sell instantly.

“I think this came about when people had more time at home to get out their old cards,” Jolean Peery said. She used to order protective sleeves and cases for the sports cards every six weeks. Now she orders them every week.

The surge in sales of cards has helped offset the decline in sports apparel, but it hasn’t been easy.

The Topps brand requires hobby box retailers to purchase all of their product lines. It’s all or nothing, and “Garbage Pail Kids” cards don’t bank the same volume as “Topps Chrome” baseball cards do.

Jolean Peery said football apparel comprises about 85% of their business. The surge in sports cards has helped, but football reigns as king.

“It’s kept us in business thus far,” John Peery said of the trading cards. “Whether we make it past January, we have to see what happens to the NFL. If the NFL does play but college doesn’t, we’re going to be in trouble.

“We’re just trying to survive.”

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FPL chooses Fort Myers areas for program

Florida Power & Light has chosen parts of the City of Fort Myers to be a part of a three-year, $193 million pilot program to install underground power lines.

The power company chose areas that faced extensive outages because of overhead trees but did not experience flooding during Hurricane Irma in 2017.

“We’re learning cost effective ways to enhance our abilities of service,” said Marie Bertot, a spokesperson for FPL. “We identified overhead power lines where these would benefit the most from under-grounding. That’s the primary cause of outages, overhead trees. When you put them underground, it cancels that out.

“In areas of flooding, underground power lines are not always better. It could take longer to restore power. There’s another criteria, and the other is day-to-day reliability.”

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If neighborhoods experienced frequent power outages that were not related to storms, they could have been chosen for the pilot program, she said.

“Underground lines performed 83% better during Irma,” Bertot said. “During Hurricane Matthew, they performed 95% better. That’s why we’re doing the pilot program. We’re committed to providing affordable energy. Our bills right now are 30% below the national average.”

FPL’s coverage of Florida includes 35 counties and looks about like the letter J, starting from south of Jacksonville, curving across Alligator Alley and then up to about Sarasota, she said, minus the Florida Keys.

The first four underground power line projects converted 681 customers.

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The next four projects, including the ones ongoing in Fort Myers, will benefit 183 customers, she said.

Projects in the planning stage will benefit 191 customers.

“They analyzed what had the most outages during hurricanes and what isn’t performing well day-to-day,” Bertot said. “That’s what they focused on, the least-performing lines.”

Connect with this reporter: David Dorsey (Facebook), @DavidADorsey (Twitter).

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