State of the Hobby: Where Have All the Kids Gone?
TCC
Posts: 162
Wanted to share this collector-written article on the status of kids and the hobby and get your thoughts on the subject as well.
Start of article:
"Within the sports card industry, manufacturers tend to concentrate on whatever is most profitable at the time and will continue to produce and sell that until it no longer works. To a large extent, that is simply what business demands. However, that has led to increased prices for many of today's trading card products. This increased pricing is, in turn, contributing to one of the biggest problems with the hobby - the lack of products that appeal to the young collector and fit within their budget.
Trading cards are coming in numerous numbered or limited-edition variations and are often geared toward the high-end thrill seeker looking for autographed and game-used cards. The base card is losing its value, along with complete sets. Hobby shops are scarce, and with owners making most of their money from collectors in their mid-twenties or thirties, many do not tailor their offerings to kids."
To read the full article, click here.
-Bob
Start of article:
"Within the sports card industry, manufacturers tend to concentrate on whatever is most profitable at the time and will continue to produce and sell that until it no longer works. To a large extent, that is simply what business demands. However, that has led to increased prices for many of today's trading card products. This increased pricing is, in turn, contributing to one of the biggest problems with the hobby - the lack of products that appeal to the young collector and fit within their budget.
Trading cards are coming in numerous numbered or limited-edition variations and are often geared toward the high-end thrill seeker looking for autographed and game-used cards. The base card is losing its value, along with complete sets. Hobby shops are scarce, and with owners making most of their money from collectors in their mid-twenties or thirties, many do not tailor their offerings to kids."
To read the full article, click here.
-Bob
TradingCardCentral.com - THE resource for trading card collectors.
TradingCardCentral.com covers sports cards, non-sports cards and collectibles and features the latest industry news, articles, product reviews, forums, giveaways and a growing number of collector resources.
0
Comments
Brian
What kid wants to mow lawns for a year to save up enough money to buy that 64 Mantle PRO 8 only to find out it's trimmed.
<< <i>What kid wants to mow lawns for a year to save up enough money to buy that 64 Mantle PRO 8 only to find out it's trimmed. >>
Bah.. They don't know who Mantle is and even if they did they couldn't aford his old cards.. The problem is kids can't aford the player cards of today.. The price of packs are crazy.. The price of the new cards are crazy.. I stopped collecting in 1996 because it was slowly getting to be too costly for me.. (I was 15 - 16 years old at the time) I'm 25 now.. I can aford it now.. however I would rather spend $20 on a pack of old 80's cards then spend it on a pack of new crap... Companies need to start making some real cheap but yet nice cards with gum inside the packs again for the kids.
Although you would think that would be the solution; I don't think it would change much if at all. While in card shops and at shows, I still hear kids talking about "that's not worth much; this one is better...it's his best card". Believe me, they know the value of cards and some will occasionally buy the $4 - $10 packs....not many, but a few. They're chasing the high $ cards as well. It's still about the thrill of getting that lottery card. There's too much money involved for the card industry to adjust back to the old days, and why would they? It's a business now. The kids who love the sport now and follow their heroes will probably get into it in their 20s to 30s because they'll all have jobs and will pick up what they remember and the players they loved.
<< <i>They don't know who Mantle is and even if they did they couldn't aford his old cards.. >>
To play the Devil's advocate, I had, and still have, a 1968 PSA 8 Mantle when I was 15.
-Ian
plus what fun is it to collect new stuff anymore? back in the day you had 1 or 2 rookies of one player...now you have 50 of each player...in pre-1990 the collecting was fun and simple..now its just too freaking complicating...
Too many people are collecting for some sort of reward at the end of the rainbow - that is not a hobby. The roots of this field stem from people trading cards for postage stamps to defray delivery costs and a few cents profit for the paper to print a simple publication.
I was wondering if anyone else has seen it this way? I guess what I am saying is that kids leave a hobby behind and a hobby doesn't abandone anyone since that's not the way it should work. The way we are being influenced and determined right now ought to blow up in our face and let the hobby re-evolve to the point where it is a relection of individual pursuits and not the other way around - just my opinion and thougths for the day - so please don't kill the messenger.
Mike
edit: clarify grammar
Kids buy Pokemon/Dragonballz/Yu-Gi-Oh cards by the truckload at $3.50 per pack, more for rare, older, OOP sets, and "good" singles sell for $3-$25 or more. They could spend this money on sportscards, they simply choose not to. And it's not just cards. Prices on all childhood staples have gone up. Marvel and DC comics are $2.25-$3 for most titles. Candy bars are 60 cents or more at 7-11. Sneakers are $50-$150. CDs are around $20 at the mall. Videogames are $50 (this is the smallest inflation as Atari 2600 games were $30). With top of the line, name-brand equipment, skateboards and bikes can cost as much as a used car. While I'd have to think that more kids might be into the hobby if packs still cost the 40 cents it did for me, it wouldn't help much.
One implication made by your article is that the card companies seem to be intentionally pricing out kids purely for the sake of profit. I don't think this is the case, as the cardmakers would like to have as many pricepoints as they can. The cost of paper has gone way up, even for the crudest, thinnest kind used today. Royalties for photographers have gone up. The cost of licensing from the player's unions and the leagues has gone way up. I read that the top players like Ken Griffey Jr. made something like $90,000 a year from licensing from the MLBPA, aside from any personal endorsement deals, and that was about a decade ago, so who knows what they make now. That is miles away from the arrangements 30 years ago where players got credit from a Topps Company store and could get maybe a microwave oven every year if they appeared on a card. And these are the costs of just putting the pictures on the paper, before getting into costs like the R&D for printing techniques, outsourcing graphic design jobs for the dozens of sets made each year, and the acquisition of things like jerseys and autographs, which are required because of the competitiveness of the marketplace today. Yes, card-makers love $5 packs because they make more profit per unit, but if it was possible to make a 40-cent pack of cards and make any reasonable profit anymore, you can bet they would do it. They simply can't.
There is also the problem with distribution and I think this is where high price points contribute most strongly to keeping kids away. At the drug and convenience stores I go to, there are no comics at all, and the packs of cards are behind the counter. You can't just pick them up and look at them, you have to ask for permission and be under the glare of the employee because they are just about the most expensive things in the store, floor-space-wise because instead of the "entry-level" brands like Topps Total, they have Topps Chrome. If this is their only exposure to cards, kids might not be aware that Total, or Bazooka, or Power Up exists, and $3.99 for 4 Chrome cards is not a good deal. Yet for a store where the floorspace-to-revenue ratio is an important metric, it works out better to sell 1 pack of Chrome versus 4 packs of Total, so that's what they stock. Around my house, there are only a couple places that have cards at all, AFAIK, and one is a 7-11 with a setup like I described, plus Target and Wal-Mart down the highway. The nearest card shop to my house is about 7 miles away. The convenience store which sits at the kind of "gateway" to my little enclave has no cards nor comics, nothing like that. Kids can't just hop on their bikes and ride to the corner store and rip a few packs, even if they were inclined. It's an expedition.
I do think that the kids that are in the hobby are in it less for the connection it gives them to the players and the information it gives them on the sport, than for the "thrill of the portfolio". I saw this just this week, and while it's just one incident, I think it's highly exemplary. Kid of about 12 goes into his LCS, buys a couple packs of Fleer Ultra football or whatever, and a Beckett. He opens the Beckett, scans the listings, and sees if what he got is "worth" what he paid for it. In this case it was, as he got an Eli Manning or some such insert card. Of course, he didn't factor in the $5.40 for the Beckett it took to validate his experience, but that's kids for you. Anyway, he left happy, so he'll be back. Sure, there is the jealousy/inferiority factor of the shiny shingles in the $5-$50 packs that are too expensive for kids, but when I was a kid and blowing my $5 allowance on 12 40-cent packs, I was always jealous of the adults who could walk into a shop and buy a whole box, or flip through the binders with the expensive older cards and take what they want because they can. I am still jealous of those people. It's part of the problem of not being infinitely wealthy, which is a whole other discussion. But if a kid was really into the hobby, he'd buy what he could afford, just like everyone else. If he was to save up and buy a pack of top-end UD stuff and found that he got 2 base singles and a Doug Bird autograph, he might get turned off to the hobby entirely, or hopefully he'd be smart enough to learn and realize that there are about a billion other things within the hobby to spend his hard-earned on.
I believe the primary reasons you don't see kids trading and flipping sportscards (as opposed to Yu-Gi-Oh) in the schoolyards and streets anymore are the diversity of interests and activities kids have today, plus those that their parents had. Kids today have parents born mostly in the 60s and 70s. Many of the kids of those decades had a little more on their minds than tuning into the Game of the Week and debating Mickey, Willie, and the Duke. Aside from the political situations that required so much energy, baseball was still America's Pastime so the other sports weren't yet really converting the fanbase, but you hear lots of people from that era say that they had just moved away from stodgy old baseball until the 1975 World Series. The people brought back by the Red Sox and the Big Red Machine had a nice ride until the 1994 strike, which probably drove as many people away as Fisk's homer drew in. Just as interest in a sport or loyalty to a team is a great thing to pass on, it's hard for the kid to develop it on his own if the parent isn't into it. My dad's not into sports at all. My love of baseball came from my mother's father, and my interest in sports started plummetting right after he died in 1987. I never realized that till just now, but it's true. Of course, contributing factors would be the fact that I was 16/17, the fact that I had moved away Philadelphia where I grew up, and the fact that the Phils and Eagles stank around that time.
Anyway, if not for Grandpa Joe, I very well might not be a sportsfan, and second-generation non-sportsfans are naturally going to be non-card-collectors, too. Leaving aside non-sports-related distractions like the Internet, baseball is rarely on broadcast TV anymore, hockey isn't at all, I don't think, unless you live in a fanchise city. Football and basketball, while unavoidable on TV, don't have the card-collecting roots that baseball does. And the sports that kids are fans of today are not traditionally within the card hobby, like soccer and lacrosse, and are more in tune with the minds that have developed while watching MTV where even the news segments are edited to a 12-cut per minute video style: the "extreme" sports where you have to have eyes like an Olympic figure-skating judge to be able to count the number of mid-air revolutions a skater does in a McTwist, or the exact angle of feet and fingers to distinguish one trick from another. Then you can go duplicate those moves on your Xbox, and discuss them online. Sports where goals are achieved one pitch at a time or one run at a time, with a minute of nothing except Tim McCarver's voice in-between. Baseball is too deliberate for those kinds of kids, and not one they can translate into a hobby they want to spend money on without getting something more directly in return, like the visceral thrill of riding a bike or a board, or a "Beckett portfolio," or even the vicarious thrill of a videogame.
2005 Origins Old Judge Brown #/20 and Black 1/1s, 2000 Ultimate Victory Gold #/25
2004 UD Legends Bake McBride autos & parallels, and 1974 Topps #601 PSA 9
Rare Grady Sizemore parallels, printing plates, autographs
Nothing on ebay
Helionaut....I'm sure you have some nuggets of wisdom , but my head hurt when I saw 6 paragraphs single-spaced.
This really is a mult-layered issue and very complex; to state it simply, kids of today ( versus 60's. 70's or 80's ) have far more distractions than the time periods just mentioned and therefore, more places competing for their money.
Add to that the decline in baseball attendance, viewership and interest plus the high cost of what should be fun, but is now an investment, and you have the framework for disinterest.
Finally, if as has been stated, today's cards are more like a lottery with only a few real money winners and then a bunch of "free ticket" you almost get your money back cards, then it will fail, for card companies have forgotten that for a few of us, collecting simple base sets is what it is all about.
And it's gotten so bad that if someone wants to collect all the cards of their favorite player, well that, too, is next to impossible unless you have tons and tons of cash.
I understand that cards have become a business and the card companies need to be profitable, but I can't believe that there isn't product available for younger collectors that would be a good product, maybe a few inserts (but not overwhelming), and make it affordable (especially since so many kids have their money being spent on other products as well).
Lets face it, for a kid that is much more appealing than buying flat pieces of cardboard. I don't blame them! The hobby has changed as a result of the technology.
<< <i>Most kids rather sit in front of there big-screen TV and play a high tech interactive baseball videogame >>
RG
I posted this a few days ago as a joke talking about what is the hobby going to be like in 30 years since someone was talking about a publication from 1974. I think the hobby will evolve - card companies will adapt to what the consumer wants. They are shoveling a lot of crap our way right now - hopefully that will change. And I agree with your statements about the changing tastes of kids and their relative attention span.
2034 Publication of SportsQuest - article is entitled: "Dig those quaint pieces of cardboard" - excerpt from the article: "I can't believe that people actually had cards graded and all that plastic that is polluting the environment! That stuff takes up all kinds of room and all the cardboard is choking me to death!... Has anyone got their 2034 Rookie edition Ipod sets yet? I strapped on my holo-viewer and the colors are unbelievably vibrant!... Did anyone notice the major league drop in the value of the Ken Griffey III RC since he has pulled another hammy and is out for another two weeks!...." On the octogenarian scene, I asked my dad (the old fart) if Barry Bonds took steroids? He said: "what, what? Barry who? Has hemorroids?...I guess all that posting on the now defunct CU Forums has fried the poor guys brains!?....
On the cost thing, the card companies have been trying to sell 99 cent and 1.99 packs - this is definintely affordable to the average kid IMO.
Mike
I agree with others that pricing is just one of many factors in the declining number of kids in the hobby. The large number of products, the large number of cards per player, the lack of packs at the gas station or grocery store and the number of other things to entertain kids all are definite factors. Although, all of these are affecting many of us older collectors as well. The hobby has changed, but one would hope that there is still some room for young collectors.
From personal experience with a 12-year-old, I do think that more emphasis should be put on learning from the success of the gaming cards. Add more of a "gaming" aspect to sports cards and you'll see more kids enter the hobby. I saw it with the way my son and his friend reacted to the Showdown and SportsClix products at the National a few weeks ago. They spent a good 1.5 hours trading cards and playing Showdown in the back seat of the car as we drove from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.
-Bob
TradingCardCentral.com - THE resource for trading card collectors.
TradingCardCentral.com covers sports cards, non-sports cards and collectibles and features the latest industry news, articles, product reviews, forums, giveaways and a growing number of collector resources.
<< <i>I have a chicken and egg question: to me a hobby is a reflection of a pursuit and is defined by those participating. When they stop participating, the hobby disappears or is redefined. What has happened here is that now the hobby exists in and of itself and it directs the pursuit of the participants instead of the other way around.
Too many people are collecting for some sort of reward at the end of the rainbow - that is not a hobby. The roots of this field stem from people trading cards for postage stamps to defray delivery costs and a few cents profit for the paper to print a simple publication.
I was wondering if anyone else has seen it this way? I guess what I am saying is that kids leave a hobby behind and a hobby doesn't abandone anyone since that's not the way it should work. The way we are being influenced and determined right now ought to blow up in our face and let the hobby re-evolve to the point where it is a relection of individual pursuits and not the other way around - just my opinion and thougths for the day - so please don't kill the messenger. >>
Interesting take on all of this. You're correct and you'll see that many now talk about the hobby in business terms rather than entertainment terms. If people no longer enjoy collecting, then why do they continue? If they can't affort to collect, then why do they do it? At some point in time, many forgot that a hobby is typically for enjoyment during your leisure time. If that's not true for someone anymore and it bothers them, then either the person should quit collecting or they should change the way they are collecting.
-Bob
TradingCardCentral.com - THE resource for trading card collectors.
TradingCardCentral.com covers sports cards, non-sports cards and collectibles and features the latest industry news, articles, product reviews, forums, giveaways and a growing number of collector resources.
What an amazing, detailed and thoughtful response. I really enjoyed reading through your post. You just don't get responses like yours on other message boards. Thanks for taking the time.
As always, there are always 2 or more sides to an issue and I think you raised some of the legitimate reasons why prices have risen.
-Bob
TradingCardCentral.com - THE resource for trading card collectors.
TradingCardCentral.com covers sports cards, non-sports cards and collectibles and features the latest industry news, articles, product reviews, forums, giveaways and a growing number of collector resources.
You too have given this some thought and appear to have responded from the heart without a hidden agenda that usually gets people's blood pressure up. You almost have to consider "dividing" up a forum into interest groups. Those who enjoy collecting due to an uncontrollable urge to save everything that crosses their path. Then you have those that see this as kind of fun but see a potential investment for the future. Then you have those that sell full or part-time. Ebay has made card shop owners out of everyone which also will change the hobby environment. Pretty complex sets of issues. I spoke with an individual who posted on the vintage forum for a bit who flat told me: "I buy and sell and could care less about collecting." Yet another subset in the realm of Collectibles.
I will dispense with the trite statement about collecting what you like....Helio harkened to an age long gone...when kids bought packs with hopes of pulling their favorite players...no priceguides, no financial gain...just the shear joy of the pull...today I pulled a Duke and a Willie! I'm so excited! A time when your buddy exclaimed RC's all around....would mean buying your friends a cola and not rookie cardz.
Thanx
your friend
Mike
<< <i>what do you call the kids that save up hundreds for boxes and singles, and packs (donruss signature 50$, ultimate collection 100$) thats me lol i guess im a rarity. >>
Glad to see that you enjoy collecting enough to set your money aside until you can buy what you want. This is a great hobby when handled properly. I started around the same age as you and am now into 22-23 years of collecting.
-Bob
TradingCardCentral.com - THE resource for trading card collectors.
TradingCardCentral.com covers sports cards, non-sports cards and collectibles and features the latest industry news, articles, product reviews, forums, giveaways and a growing number of collector resources.
If I actually had to consciously save up to buy a pack of cards, I would have found another hobby or just bought more Slurpees.
Saving money when you are a kid is no fun.
<< <i>You too have given this some thought and appear to have responded from the heart without a hidden agenda that usually gets people's blood pressure up. You almost have to consider "dividing" up a forum into interest groups. Those who enjoy collecting due to an uncontrollable urge to save everything that crosses their path. Then you have those that see this as kind of fun but see a potential investment for the future. Then you have those that sell full or part-time. Ebay has made card shop owners out of everyone which also will change the hobby environment. Pretty complex sets of issues. I spoke with an individual who posted on the vintage forum for a bit who flat told me: "I buy and sell and could care less about collecting." Yet another subset in the realm of Collectibles.
I will dispense with the trite statement about collecting what you like....Helio harkened to an age long gone...when kids bought packs with hopes of pulling their favorite players...no priceguides, no financial gain...just the shear joy of the pull...today I pulled a Duke and a Willie! I'm so excited! A time when your buddy exclaimed RC's all around....would mean buying your friends a cola and not rookie cardz.
>>
Mike,
Thanks. I think I generally fall into the 2nd category of "those that see this as kind of fun but see a potential investment for the future". Although, my level of enjoyment is higher than "kind of fun" and I'm not too worried about what my roomful of stuff is worth now or in the future. Actually, it might make me sick to know.
I agree though that it's surprising how many people in the hobby say the "could care less about collecting" and the number of people who say they no longer enjoy it. The Beckett message board (baseball forums at the moment) is full of threads of "collectors" saying these things. Right now, there is a thread asking people to name 1 thing that is fun about the hobby. What? One thing, that's it? If someone can't find even 1 thing, then it's time to quit. Then, you have collectors who lead other hobby web sites taking part in the same threads or starting other threads about when the hobby was fun. I just don't get it. Once again, if it's not enjoyable - stop.
In the end, this is a hobby and it will be what we each decide to make of it.
-Bob
TradingCardCentral.com - THE resource for trading card collectors.
TradingCardCentral.com covers sports cards, non-sports cards and collectibles and features the latest industry news, articles, product reviews, forums, giveaways and a growing number of collector resources.
<< <i>I don't remember having to save up to buy cards when I was a kid. If I found a quarter on the street, it went to the local 7-11, and I walked off with a pack of '82 Donruss.
If I actually had to consciously save up to buy a pack of cards, I would have found another hobby or just bought more Slurpees.
Saving money when you are a kid is no fun. >>
for me it is fun opening the packs and seeing sometimes valuable cards w/ a piece of history (bat, jsy, glove, hat , shoe etc.) on them. i also see it as an investment, because 50+ yrs from now i intend to sell my collection, along w/ boxes and packs etc. to kids like me that like the thrill of collecting.
One pack of SP Authentic is $7! Kids don't have that much cash on them.
<< <i>What kid wants to mow lawns for a year to save up enough money to buy that 64 Mantle PRO 8 only to find out it's trimmed. >>
LOL
But the card companies aren't interested in targeting children--they are interested in targeting the market segment that has the most bucks and falls for the ads, which in television has traditionally been the 18-49 demographic. But another part of this business and the costs associated with it go beyond who the target audience is. Topps used to pay players $250 for contracts, and cards used to be cheap, piss poor quality cardboard wrapped in wax and sold with the world's worst tasting and cheapest gum. Player contracts have multiplied xxxfold, the quality and costs associated with producing cards has increased, and couple that with inflation in general and the days of the 50 cent wax pack are long gone, regardless what segment the card companies are after.
Aside from a few key rookies from each year, the rest of the trash produced since 1985 isn't going anywhere, ever. Times have changed considerably. It used to be that a hot player would have hot cards from every single year he played--take a look at Mantle, Aaron, Clemente, Rose, Mays, etc. --their rookies are valued more, but every other year they appear on a card is also a pricey endeavor. Today, stars like Bonds and Griffey, Mcgwire, Clemens, Ripken--their rookies are the only cards of value of speak of, and their second year cards onward are worthless. "Rare inserts"--you can make a million different 1 of 1 cards or you can make a million of the same card, and it's the same damn thing, just packaged different. You can't tell anyone you have a 2005 Bonds card and they'll know what you have--you couldn't even say Bonds insert, or Bonds auto, or Bonds jersey. You'd have to stick it under a microscope and locate about a thousand different identifiers to figure out which set, which parallel, which color, which serial number'd holographic set it is from. And so you have the only one in existance, but there's a zillion other people out there with the same thing, just slightly different, which makes set building impossible and of course frustrating to say the least.
No, the companies gave collectors what they wanted. Nobody ate that disgusting gum anyway, and everyone complained about the cheapo cardboard and quality problems. Nobody liked watching the mass production era strip away the value of their cards as they sat in the garage taking up more space than they were eventually worth. Collectors got exactly what they wanted, and while the modern card market is a farce and a putrid joke, the hobby itself cannot be destroyed, because it simply makes the vintage stuff that much more desirable. And for the prices some people are shelling out for their new gold foiled clown cards, you can pick up some pretty neat stuff from decades gone by.
Lee
<< <i>Nobody ate that disgusting gum anyway >>
You must be young base...
Topps chewing gum started in 1938 - candy stores kept it close to the register in hopes to get someone to pick up a few penny pieces rather than taking the change.
After WWII, it evolved into Bazooka bubble gum - very popular along with Fleer's Dubble Bubble. As the Bazooka fans know - the wrappers had the adventures of bazooka joe and there was redemption promotions.
Then around 1950 - they got the great idea to sell even more gum by inserting cards into packs.
So, in the world of chicken and egg, the chicken was the GUM and the egg - the cards.
It was considered a quality product until they removed it in the 80s. In fact, when Fleer and Donruss busted the monopoly, one of the concessions I believe - Topps held the 'right' to insert the gum.
So, to this day - the boomers consider the gum - Good Stuff!
Now, in 2007 - you may have a point - but you would be surprised how many love the Heritage gum.
mike
Personally i LIKe the gum.
dissolved completely on my tongue... tasted just awful.. cha ching!
<< <i>I don't remember having to save up to buy cards when I was a kid. If I found a quarter on the street, it went to the local 7-11, and I walked off with a pack of '82 Donruss.
If I actually had to consciously save up to buy a pack of cards, I would have found another hobby or just bought more Slurpees.
Saving money when you are a kid is no fun. >>
Who did you hope to get in that pack? I wonder if you found some no-name youngester in the pack by the name of Cal Ripken, Jr and felt disappointed in getting a "common" and not getting a Pete Rose or something.
D's: 50P,49S,45D+S,43D,41S,40D,39D+S,38D+S,37D+S,36S,35D+S,all 16-34's
Q's: 52S,47S,46S,40S,39S,38S,37D+S,36D+S,35D,34D,32D+S
74T: 241,435,610,654 97 Finest silver: 115,135,139,145,310
73T:31,55,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,80,152,165,189,213,235,237,257,341,344,377,379,390,422,433,453,480,497,545,554,563,580,606,613,630
95 Ultra GM Sets: Golden Prospects,HR Kings,On-Base Leaders,Power Plus,RBI Kings,Rising Stars
Mark
Raw: Tony Gonzalez (low #'d cards, and especially 1/1's) and Steve Young.
Not only that, aside from having a game system hooked to their t.v., they also need a hand held version, so they double dip.
I sold all my high priced cards, as there are basically two generations of collectors left, the ones with one foot in the grave, and the 30-40something. Below that are some, but not nearly as much as those two groups.
All the collectors currently say, "Boy, when the market falls, I will be there to scoop up all the deals." The only problem with that is, how much good will it do you when you are 80?
There is still a good 30 years left of a vibrant money-growing-hobby, but once those two generations are done...I wouldn't expect the prices to stay where they are at, because there won't be near the buyers.
If you are 12 right now, I would say you are going to love your 40's if you are a baseball card collector!
<< <i>Nice article, it's just a matter of time before "bustin wax" becomes an official table game at Vegas.
Brian >>
Lmmfao
Might as well be
The kids have choices, they just choose not to buy the cheap packs.
Collecting all cards - Gus Zernial
Post Cereal both raw and PSA Graded (1961-1963)
You would think if the market is losing demand then the card companies would consolidate products. In my opinion, there is way too much product in the market. I see kids pulling the "money" cards and basically dumping the rest of the cards. Maybe the card companies should produce one brand with a complete set and then produce "lotto" packs under other brands. It's sad that most card shops and card shows have been eliminated.
-Danny
<< <i>Are there less collectors (customers) than 10 years ago? If so, how do the card companies maintain profits with all the product on the market? >>
I go back to when I was a kid in grade school in the mid 70s. I only had one other classmate that I would consider a serious collector in my grade. There were several others that collected, but they came and went and never seemed to collect over a long period of time.
But this was the prevideo game era.
I guess it's just not profitable for today's convenience stores to carry the stuff anymore, but if there was more availability of packs in more locations I'd bet impulse purchases would real in more potential collectors.
Just an old geezer sharing some memories.
R73 1933 Goudey Indian Gum - Series 288 - Nos. 118
Also looking for 1953 Parkhurst & 1953 Quaker Oats Ripley's BION.
If you have any available for sale PM me
money is being spent by kids on pricey vid game systems and the games themselves. Ipods, downloads, DVD's
another point: I cant go to my local convenience store, quickie mart, cumberland farms or grocery store and find baseball cards. No rack packs, no cellos no foil, no wax.
I can find them at the mall, at Target or WalMart, but the USEd to be everywhere.
I feel like I just got done reading a book .
I wonder if some of you are writers by trade ?
The kids really haven't gone anywhere as far as I can tell .
Especially at the shops around me .
In talking to one of the kids father at the shop he explained how his 3 sons have made a small business out of buying cards and turning right around and selling them on E-Bay , he explained that all his sons friends are into that now and I wonder if that is where most of the kids are .
Back in the 70's and 80's there were only a few different cards to be had and they weren't $40 - $50 - $300.00 per pack .
I believe the hobby has gotten extremely complex and maybe some of the kids that actually try to finish sets find it almost impossible to complete without having to go out and look for a second job
For me though, I like the way the cards have evolved .
I love the new shiney stuff as a matter of fact that is what got me back into collecting the cards again after taking something like 10 years off .
Only to marry a woman with a larger card collection than I have
Now we both go crazy along with the addition of our only son , who is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon as he is completely perplexed by the hobby and all it's many different types of cards .