Arrco deck made in Hong kong?

[jupiter3]

I just acquired a couple of decks from an estate sale that I am puzzled about.  The decks are paper (non coated) made by Arrco and include the line "Made in Hong Kong" on the AoS and the two Jokers.  The AoS includes the PLA-MOR line as many Arrco decks have.  I thought Arrco decks were good old American cards.  By the way, the backs are a bad photograph of a Tucan bird.  Is this unusual?  I know, it's only a garbage deck,  but I've never noticed the Arrcos Made in Hong Kong before.

[Don Boyer]

We actually have an older topic that covers this, but from a different angle in regard to Chinese-made Streamline decks.

I had a similar experience once at a store in Westchester County, NY.  I walked into a newly-built pharmacy chain store and noticed some decks they don't usually sell, among which were some Chinese-made Aviators.  While I was standing in the stiore, I gave Bill Schildman a call to ask about this - we had previously worked together on tracking down counterfeit Bee decks being sold in my area.

Bill stated that yes, there was a brief period of time in the early 2000s when USPC farmed out some of the work making their lesser-known brands to a Chinese print company.  The quality, as you can imagine, simply wasn't good enough - the printing contracts were pulled for all the brands except for Mavericks, which are still made in China.  The other brands are back to being manufactured at USPC's headquarters, first in Cincinnati, OH, now as of August '09 in Erlanger, KY.  I've personally purchased Streamlines from WalMart with a recent copyright year and "made in Erlanger, KY" among the legal jargon at the bottom of the tuck box.

Mavericks are a regional brand known in the South (except for Florida) but is beginning to expand its reach as "dollar store" chains like Family Dollar branch out into new territory around the country.  They're at the lowest end of the USPC line for quality, but they're also the least expensive, typically selling for 99 cents or a dollar.

Anyway, Bill further explained that the decks I found were "old new stock" - they'd been buried in the back of this company's warehouse in neighboring Connecticut and pulled out in the rush to fill the shelves at the newly-opened location.  The decks had originally been ordered to be shipped back to USPC, but this lot obviously didn't make it, probably because someone lost track of them at some point before then ended up in this store.  He said he'd call the company's inventory manager about it.  I never saw those brands on sale there again.

The company was purchased not too long after by Walgreens and they now carry the "Play-Right" decks, Bicycle standards, jumbo, pinochle, Prestige and WSOP - and not much else.  That short list is the standard Walgreens deck inventory these days, though there are occasional and sometimes even regional differences.