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Originally Posted by BioCRN
Totally anecdotal on my end, but a lot of what I've seen with kids (highschool and younger) around my area is it's a price-limiting hobby for busting packs and they tend to have parents with more disposable income.
It's not a bad thing, but it's skewed enough to notice that a lot of the kids opening new product aren't scraping up allowance money saved for weeks to pick up stuff.
$3 a pack on the low end and the "good stuff" costing much more is a hell of a barrier. New/hot stuff is insane. Shops are doing pre-sales on packs...on packs...$10+/pack for 2024 Bowman is common and the price probably won't drop when the product hits shelves.
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I live in Japan and have two elementary school age kids. The main maker of baseball cards here sells them for about 75 cents a pack. Those packs come with a bag of potato chips and you can buy them almost anywhere - supermarkets, convenience stores, etc. No price gouging anywhere.
That easy accessability to kids makes a massive difference. We collect the set together each year and they are extremely into them. We buy them whenever we go shopping, and I can easily afford to bring them home from work for them whenever I feel like it. We have a paper checklist, keep our cards in a small shoebox, don’t care when cards get dinged corners, get excited when we pull cards of our favorite team, throw the cards of our least favorite team on the floor in disgust when we pull them and just have fun with it.
If we lived in the US none of that would be possible and my kids probably wouldn’t be interested in baseball cards at all. Expensive hobbies lose a lot of fun with every dollar that gets pumped into them. I love the simplicity of collecting over here….