A dealer at the local coin club reports a dreary Ontario show (CA), where a good percentage of dealers didn't even make their table money, and there were almost no retail sellers. The down turn in bullion is a big cause of no sellers. Folks don't connect that with the numismatic coin market, but for more than half the dealers, bullion is what has paid the bills during the past decade. Any numismatic coins that come in with the bullion buys are a plus, and are often where much of the fresh lower and mid level material comes from. I know this forum is mostly concerned with the top 10% (top 10% income, top 10% net worth), but the next tier of incomes, the 10% to 33%, is what many dealers make their living from.
Third data point is the local coin club. It likely peaked about a year ago. Now with silver down, interest is modestly lower, say peak 45 now more like 35. Some of that may be due to summer vacations. However, the club is still far more active than it was, say 15 years ago. I wasn't involved back then, but there were meetings when the officers equaled the attendees (under 10 total) and the raffle was so small that the prize was sometimes a single mint set with each coin cut out as a separate prize. One secret to the flock increasing, has been almost free food, often pizza at the meetings, which the club pays for half of, and volunteers pay for the other half, with donations defraying some of that half.
The other decline factor almost no one seems to have mentioned is the broader economic cycle. Young people have a much harder time getting established. Full time jobs are much harder to get over the last five years than any time since the 1930s. Competition is fierce. The educated youth often have huge student loan debts that preclude spending on hobbies. Another trend is that most youth would rather spend money on their phone and TV subscriptions than coins, that and Starbucks and other Apple brand products or similar. A person could fund a decent coin collection with the average 30 year old's cable/phone/Starbucks/Apple expenditures. Even lower middle class folks often spend freely on cable and phone. It didn't used to be that way. The Iphone is only about six years old and $100 cable TV bills are a relatively recent thing too.
I go to a lot of shows in the Northeast and have noted that while there are a few (and I want to say relatively a precious few) young attendees - as opposed to definitive collectors - they are distinctly in the extreme minority. So the fact that there are a few at coin shows only shows that the demographic is not entirely "dead" but rather buttresses the case for the younger set being in a relative decline. There were many more at the local coin shop and local shows growing up, and I could nearly always find somebody interested in talking or trading coins after school.
I have not seen anybody younger that 30 in the several coin clubs whose meetings I have attended. The list goes on and on...
I really don't see it as the death of coin collecting but rather a decline. So that there certainly seem to be young collectors, just fewer in number. My son has absolutely no interest despite my best efforts, and certainly neither do any of his friends. As my dad used to have a "penny ante" poker bag of pennies, I was fascinated by the new hall every Sunday to look for bits & loved the old 1954 S quarter that had been the prize target of a .22 rifle contest and the slightly bent 1850 dime. My son and his friends essentially have no interest in such things.
Doubtlessly, and fortunately a few others do...
Love that Milled British (1830-1960) Well, just Love coins, period.
I think that this hobby has jumped by leaps and bounds because of the Internet. One of the big threats to the hobby are the high prices that we see because of the amount of fresh money that has been pulled in to the market via Internet sales. There has also been a huge increase in demand for tokens and medals. Time was you could buy many of these pieces in very nice condition for less than $100. Bargains like that are few and far between these days. We need more "ground floor" opportunities for new collectors.
Yes, a lot of clubs are in trouble. People just don't have the time in their busy schedules to attend meetings. Most club members seem to be very young or fairly old. Still things were really hopping at my local club's show yesterday. I was amazed at how full the parking lot was, and sometimes it was hard to get up and down the aisles.
I think the hobby is fairly strong for the most part. The biggest threat to it from my perspective is the loss of American affluence and perceptions by many young people that they are not going to be able to do as well financially as their parents were able to do. That perception is not only a cause for concern so far as coin collecting goes but also for the overall health of our nation.
Retired dealer and avid collector of U.S. type coins, 19th century presidential campaign medalets and selected medals. In recent years I have been working on a set of British coins - at least one coin from each king or queen who issued pieces that are collectible. I am also collecting at least one coin for each Roman emperor from Julius Caesar to ... ?
<< <i>Well this week in the San Fernando Valley, we had a B&M with a bidboard close its doors
On the other hand my local B&M in Simi sprouted two new stores in Studio City and Ventura so far this year
Steve >>
Yes, I was disappointed by this as well, and was in attendance for the last board.(Which was packed with people of a broad range of ages.) I also attended the second bid board for a shop that just reopened in the San Gabriel valley.(Also fairly busy with a broad range of ages, and a few collectors of the fairer gender). The hobby itself in my area, seems to be going fairly strong. I do think that the internet while it has it's benefits to the broadening of the hobby, is also slowly killing the clubs and even to some extent the future of shows. Kids today and young adults grow up with a different set of social skill than my generation. Many are just as happy, if not happier sitting at home on their computer talking with friends or texting than actually sitting face to face with a person having a conversation. I know that at my local coin club, it seems that a few people are actually interested in making changes to bring in new members and bring back the ones that just stopped coming. Most of the members are just not interested in change, don't have time to help, or prefer it just be a place to go and eat cake once a month. Talking with members of a few other local clubs yesterday seems that this is fairly common. But all that being said, I collected for years without ever going to a coin show or club meeting.
RT, as usual, with some excellent points. Young people, post high school, college, and grad school, are unemployed and underemployed and more concerned about the noose of student debt and other credit obligations to be buying coins. Many are putting off what normally occurs in their twenties and thirties- buying a home, getting married, starting a family, and, heaven forbid, put a few bucks aside for emergencies and retirement savings- to even consider hobbies for their nonexistent disposable income.
That said, I think as others have touched upon, the hobby remains dominated by middle age and older men, who are using the internet as their coin show/coin shop/coin club/Coin World/etc. Coin show attendance, ANA membership, coin club meetings, and other 20th century measures of the health of coin hobby no longer apply. Look at all of the stuff that sold at the two ANA auctions ($70M or so), and for the prices that they sold, and tell me that the hobby is in decline.
IMO.... all of us should do what ever we can to keep this hobby alive, although I think it is already alive. Show a coin to a child and they will be in awe, as we were, and still are! I'm waiting on a recent puchase to arrive, 1795 flowing hair silver dollar and a 1799 silver dollar, that will be added to the collection/hoard.
I don"t think the fluctuation of higher priced coins is a measure of the health of the hobby.
That is simply a recalibratiom of what collectors and coin dealer market makers with more money are willing to pay.
At the recent ANA I saw plenty of transactions of coins going on in bargin bins, raw coins, Whitman folders, and the like.
Lets not forget the the enjoyment of the hobby has nothing to do with the price of the coin.
Those who collect lower priced coins get just as much enjoyment as those who collect higher priced coins. There may be a difference in pride of ownership but not enjoyment.
And fortunately most coins are not that expensive and are varied enough for a young person to get started to enjoy the hobby and maintain interest.
I manage money. I earn money. I save money . I give away money. I collect money. I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
I think that previous generations (you old guys) had the excitement when you were young to hunt through rolls of change and find silver regularly, beautiful coins from the early 1900's were sitting around in your parents or grandparents coffee tin under the floorboard in the bedroom where as kids these days (I'm 26) just don't have the chance to build a relationship/passion for coins. Yes we see kids at shows and stores but I'm betting 99% of those kids are there because their mom or dad is a collector and has kinda rubbed off on them. But the bond of "My dad bought me this cool coin" versus "LOOK! I found a walking liberty in change today!" is not as strong to develop a love for coins.
I started collecting just last year with Pres Dollars into proof sets and state quarters. For the longest time 3-4 dollars was the most I spent on a coin and it was very rewarding to see a set build and complete it. Now that I'm building a Dansco7070 and BU silver Washies set, I am finding it exceedingly difficult to spend 40-100 dollars on a coin let alone 1,000+ as some collectors regularly pay without batting an eyelash. I work full time, and live with my parents, while paying darn near $500 monthly in student loans so the discretionary income just isn't there for me and I think that I am not an anomaly in saying that is something most "Millenials" as the news calls us, is going through. (Perhaps many of you have 20-something children still living with you?)
But if I were to paint wide reaching assumptions with almost no basis in facts or observations, I do see a potential decline in the collector base. Where as many of the previous generations have personal stories "My grandmother gave me a Morgan dollar for grade school graduation" and the like, there are just not those connections being made nearly as often as they have been previously.
Author's note* I reserve the right to be completely wrong with my response.
<< <i>I think that previous generations (you old guys) had the excitement when you were young to hunt through rolls of change and find silver regularly, beautiful coins from the early 1900's >>
I'm one of those old guys but when you consider that my allowance at that time was 50 cents a week, that didn't allow for setting aside very many of those beautiful coins, even if you did manage to find them in rolls at face value.
knoxy4 Welcome to the flock. You're in. You have a 7070... congrats . No turning back now. It took me over 40 years to spend more than $100 on a coin The future looks promising.
But the bond of "My dad bought me this cool coin" versus "LOOK! I found a walking liberty in change today!" is not as strong to develop a love for coins.
I hear you. The romance and nostalgia are just not there like they were for earlier generations.
I am 48, and my two primary catalysts for collecting coins, when I was a kid, were my grandmother's collection (including many albums, including mostly full Morgan albums, and her hoard of silver coins saved in the 1960's) and my father's small stash of coins that included coins saved by his grandfather from working selling newspapers around the turn of the century (read: around 1900). These influences are just not there for the younger collectors.
In short, I feel there are new people entering numismatics but not necessarily as collectors. In my opinion those are factors that indicate a potential decline in the purely "hobby" area of numismatics. For starters, the US Mint has turned into a coin dealer and their growing crop of new offerings is diverting and in some cases pulling significant money from the classic collector coin market that otherwise would have been placed there. A lot of people who call themselves hobbyists are actually turning into flippers and aren't really expanding their collections per se; they are moreso hoping for a payoff on the flip if/when the items get the coveted grade. Also, it's been said so often that it borders on cliché... but younger people just aren't quite as interested as they were in the pre-high tech era imo. I'm only 50- but even comparing my childhood with that of kids today you see that there are too many distractions...combine these with an instant-gratification mindset promulgated by today's society and it tends to make things like numismatics seem boring by comparison. Yes, there are kids who still enter and enjoy the hobby but the numbers certainly seem smaller and the motivations are different now. Here in the shop I've seen relatives/parents getting things for kids as gifts but I don't see the kids themselves coming in as often as previously. In the earlier days we had kids that grew up with the store... some of them are now married with kids of their own. For me, my uncle got me hooked at about age 7 and I pretty much stayed hooked (except for a brief period when I found out about girls and cars... ...but even then I still was active in one form or another.) Of course my experience was admittedly a bit different because I was helping out at a coin shop as early as high school age.
It could be worse though; be glad you don't have stamps...
I'm 54. My father and great uncle had significant coin collections, so I was exposed to the concept at an early age. I was five years old when silver coinage was discontinued. Back then, you frequently saw stuff like Indian head cents, Liberty and Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and Barber silver coins in your change. The older stuff was usually pretty worn, and not worth more in a basal sense, so it continued to circulate.
At least part of the difference for today's kids is that while there is plenty of variety in US coin designs, most of it is of recent vintage, and none of that stuff is intrinsically more valuable. There's no financial motive (however small) to cull stuff from change. Now, if the new designs were "cool" or distinctive, that might help, but the mint has been mining (no pun intended) the same conceptual ground in design for an eternity and there's not much new under the sun.
Streamlining is more like it IMHO, with the unavoidable loss of nuance and texture for most. Sight unseen - just money. "Attempting" to streamline something that can not by definition be streamlined seems a very, very good idea for some early birds, especially with so many variables and ways to achieve the "same" results...and then "do overs" and "retries"...
Comments
I am far less active than I used to be.
A dealer at the local coin club reports a dreary Ontario show (CA), where a good percentage of dealers didn't even make their table money, and there were almost no retail sellers. The down turn in bullion is a big cause of no sellers. Folks don't connect that with the numismatic coin market, but for more than half the dealers, bullion is what has paid the bills during the past decade. Any numismatic coins that come in with the bullion buys are a plus, and are often where much of the fresh lower and mid level material comes from. I know this forum is mostly concerned with the top 10% (top 10% income, top 10% net worth), but the next tier of incomes, the 10% to 33%, is what many dealers make their living from.
Third data point is the local coin club. It likely peaked about a year ago. Now with silver down, interest is modestly lower, say peak 45 now more like 35. Some of that may be due to summer vacations. However, the club is still far more active than it was, say 15 years ago. I wasn't involved back then, but there were meetings when the officers equaled the attendees (under 10 total) and the raffle was so small that the prize was sometimes a single mint set with each coin cut out as a separate prize. One secret to the flock increasing, has been almost free food, often pizza at the meetings, which the club pays for half of, and volunteers pay for the other half, with donations defraying some of that half.
The other decline factor almost no one seems to have mentioned is the broader economic cycle. Young people have a much harder time getting established. Full time jobs are much harder to get over the last five years than any time since the 1930s. Competition is fierce. The educated youth often have huge student loan debts that preclude spending on hobbies. Another trend is that most youth would rather spend money on their phone and TV subscriptions than coins, that and Starbucks and other Apple brand products or similar. A person could fund a decent coin collection with the average 30 year old's cable/phone/Starbucks/Apple expenditures. Even lower middle class folks often spend freely on cable and phone. It didn't used to be that way. The Iphone is only about six years old and $100 cable TV bills are a relatively recent thing too.
I have not seen anybody younger that 30 in the several coin clubs whose meetings I have attended. The list goes on and on...
I really don't see it as the death of coin collecting but rather a decline. So that there certainly seem to be young collectors, just fewer in number. My son has absolutely no interest despite my best efforts, and certainly neither do any of his friends. As my dad used to have a "penny ante" poker bag of pennies, I was fascinated by the new hall every Sunday to look for bits & loved the old 1954 S quarter that had been the prize target of a .22 rifle contest and the slightly bent 1850 dime. My son and his friends essentially have no interest in such things.
Doubtlessly, and fortunately a few others do...
Well, just Love coins, period.
Yes, a lot of clubs are in trouble. People just don't have the time in their busy schedules to attend meetings. Most club members seem to be very young or fairly old. Still things were really hopping at my local club's show yesterday. I was amazed at how full the parking lot was, and sometimes it was hard to get up and down the aisles.
I think the hobby is fairly strong for the most part. The biggest threat to it from my perspective is the loss of American affluence and perceptions by many young people that they are not going to be able to do as well financially as their parents were able to do. That perception is not only a cause for concern so far as coin collecting goes but also for the overall health of our nation.
On the other hand my local B&M in Simi sprouted two new stores in Studio City and Ventura
so far this year
Steve
<< <i>Well this week in the San Fernando Valley, we had a B&M with a bidboard close its doors
On the other hand my local B&M in Simi sprouted two new stores in Studio City and Ventura
so far this year
Steve >>
Yes, I was disappointed by this as well, and was in attendance for the last board.(Which was packed with people of a broad range of ages.) I also attended the second bid board for a shop that just reopened in the San Gabriel valley.(Also fairly busy with a broad range of ages, and a few collectors of the fairer gender). The hobby itself in my area, seems to be going fairly strong. I do think that the internet while it has it's benefits to the broadening of the hobby, is also slowly killing the clubs and even to some extent the future of shows. Kids today and young adults grow up with a different set of social skill than my generation. Many are just as happy, if not happier sitting at home on their computer talking with friends or texting than actually sitting face to face with a person having a conversation.
I know that at my local coin club, it seems that a few people are actually interested in making changes to bring in new members and bring back the ones that just stopped coming. Most of the members are just not interested in change, don't have time to help, or prefer it just be a place to go and eat cake once a month. Talking with members of a few other local clubs yesterday seems that this is fairly common.
But all that being said, I collected for years without ever going to a coin show or club meeting.
My Ebay Store
"Seu cabra da peste,
"Sou Mangueira......."
That said, I think as others have touched upon, the hobby remains dominated by middle age and older men, who are using the internet as their coin show/coin shop/coin club/Coin World/etc. Coin show attendance, ANA membership, coin club meetings, and other 20th century measures of the health of coin hobby no longer apply. Look at all of the stuff that sold at the two ANA auctions ($70M or so), and for the prices that they sold, and tell me that the hobby is in decline.
Art and Design
History
A world without boundaries in terms of what can be collected
Rarity-
Technology
precious metals
The problem is reaching people- and the Hobby needs to make an effort to reach people and there seems to be no interest in doing so
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
That is simply a recalibratiom of what collectors and coin dealer market makers with more money are willing to pay.
At the recent ANA I saw plenty of transactions of coins going on in bargin bins, raw coins, Whitman folders, and the like.
Lets not forget the the enjoyment of the hobby has nothing to do with the price of the coin.
Those who collect lower priced coins get just as much enjoyment as those who collect higher
priced coins. There may be a difference in pride of ownership but not enjoyment.
And fortunately most coins are not that expensive and are varied enough for a young person to get started to enjoy the hobby and maintain interest.
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
I started collecting just last year with Pres Dollars into proof sets and state quarters. For the longest time 3-4 dollars was the most I spent on a coin and it was very rewarding to see a set build and complete it. Now that I'm building a Dansco7070 and BU silver Washies set, I am finding it exceedingly difficult to spend 40-100 dollars on a coin let alone 1,000+ as some collectors regularly pay without batting an eyelash. I work full time, and live with my parents, while paying darn near $500 monthly in student loans so the discretionary income just isn't there for me and I think that I am not an anomaly in saying that is something most "Millenials" as the news calls us, is going through. (Perhaps many of you have 20-something children still living with you?)
But if I were to paint wide reaching assumptions with almost no basis in facts or observations, I do see a potential decline in the collector base. Where as many of the previous generations have personal stories "My grandmother gave me a Morgan dollar for grade school graduation" and the like, there are just not those connections being made nearly as often as they have been previously.
Author's note* I reserve the right to be completely wrong with my response.
<< <i>I think that previous generations (you old guys) had the excitement when you were young to hunt through rolls of change and find silver regularly, beautiful coins from the early 1900's >>
I'm one of those old guys but when you consider that my allowance at that time was 50 cents a week, that didn't allow for setting aside very many of those beautiful coins, even if you did manage to find them in rolls at face value.
Welcome to the flock. You're in. You have a 7070... congrats . No turning back now. It took me over 40 years to spend more than $100 on a coin
The future looks promising.
``https://ebay.us/m/KxolR5
I hear you. The romance and nostalgia are just not there like they were for earlier generations.
I am 48, and my two primary catalysts for collecting coins, when I was a kid, were my grandmother's collection (including many albums, including mostly full Morgan albums, and her hoard of silver coins saved in the 1960's) and my father's small stash of coins that included coins saved by his grandfather from working selling newspapers around the turn of the century (read: around 1900). These influences are just not there for the younger collectors.
In my opinion those are factors that indicate a potential decline in the purely "hobby" area of numismatics. For starters, the US Mint has turned into a coin dealer and their growing crop of new offerings is diverting and in some cases pulling significant money from the classic collector coin market that otherwise would have been placed there. A lot of people who call themselves hobbyists are actually turning into flippers and aren't really expanding their collections per se; they are moreso hoping for a payoff on the flip if/when the items get the coveted grade.
Also, it's been said so often that it borders on cliché... but younger people just aren't quite as interested as they were in the pre-high tech era imo. I'm only 50- but even comparing my childhood with that of kids today you see that there are too many distractions...combine these with an instant-gratification mindset promulgated by today's society and it tends to make things like numismatics seem boring by comparison. Yes, there are kids who still enter and enjoy the hobby but the numbers certainly seem smaller and the motivations are different now. Here in the shop I've seen relatives/parents getting things for kids as gifts but I don't see the kids themselves coming in as often as previously. In the earlier days we had kids that grew up with the store... some of them are now married with kids of their own. For me, my uncle got me hooked at about age 7 and I pretty much stayed hooked (except for a brief period when I found out about girls and cars...
It could be worse though; be glad you don't have stamps...
RIP Mom- 1932-2012
an early age. I was five years old when silver coinage was discontinued. Back then, you frequently saw
stuff like Indian head cents, Liberty and Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and Barber silver coins in your
change. The older stuff was usually pretty worn, and not worth more in a basal sense, so it continued
to circulate.
At least part of the difference for today's kids is that while there is plenty of variety in US coin designs,
most of it is of recent vintage, and none of that stuff is intrinsically more valuable. There's no financial
motive (however small) to cull stuff from change. Now, if the new designs were "cool" or distinctive,
that might help, but the mint has been mining (no pun intended) the same conceptual ground in
design for an eternity and there's not much new under the sun.
My pair of Lincolns.
"Attempting" to streamline something that can not by definition be streamlined seems a very, very good idea for some early birds, especially with so many variables and ways to achieve the "same" results...and then "do overs" and "retries"...
wash, rinse, repeat.
Eric
Rob
Successful Trades with: Coincast, MICHAELDIXON
Successful Purchases from: Manorcourtman, Meltdown