Poker chips and gaming supplies are no longer a specialty market. It used to be there were just a handvul of places where you could get a decent set of poker chips. Those days are over. While this may seem like good news, it also creates a problem: a glut of low quality poker chips, that appear to be high quality being sold on line. This article will quickly explain where these poker chips are coming from and what to watch for.
As someone who has been in the import/export business for years (as well as a poker nut), I can tell you that 95% of the poker chips sold in this country are imported from Asian countries, specifically China.
This in itself is not bad. However, the problem lies in the fact that many Chinese factories do not understand what Americans expect in terms of quality. So they manufacture low cost, low quality poker chips.
Are there any quality poker chips coming out of China?
The answer is yes. However, these factories are producing poker chips under the supervision and quality control of someone who knows the US market, in most cases Americans.
For instance, I know one US importer who creates a poker chip design and gets a US trademark on it. He then hires a Chinese factory to produce the poker chips, and sends his two sons over to China to these factories to make sure what is coming out is acceptable US quality.
This is not the case for many of the poker chips you see online however. Many Chinese factories will send a few samples of their poker chips to an unwitting US online retailer. They make sure the samples look good, but after the retailer places a large order, what they get are discolored, uneven poker chips. And as you might imagine, these Chinese factories do not have a return policy, so the low quality poker chips get sold to you.
Many of these factories are just outright criminal as well. They will take a US trademarked poker chips design, and copy it, then try to sell it to the unwitting online poker chip retailer. What the retailer doesn’t know is that they are buying poker chips that infringe on a US trademark. While it’s very difficult to go after the factory in China, US customs will concentrate on seizing the goods as they clear customs. Thus the US online retailer takes the loss.
So the key is identifying the quality poker chips and finding the retailer that supplies them. Check out the quality poker retailer ratings page, where I help identify the good and bad retailers of poker chips.
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