My access to $

6 year old me was broke and not a kid smoker in 1909 unfortunately


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More money more problems....also the profiteers look at it like this...don't hate the player hate the game. The game is on the side of the profiteer not the collector...now to me that's what's changed the most. The deck has never been stacked more against the collector and less against the machine.

I have accepted it...it's just the way it is.

Wow
 

Looking at gemrate
361,000 ja morants graded
271,000 Nolan Ryan’s graded

Two of the biggest thing are the internet like many have said, and the price paid for packs.

I bought my first computer in early 1997 and the world immediately opened up. Suddenly I had opportunities to buy things I'd only ready about, and certainly never seen for sale. Up until 1997 my collecting was limited to buying out of the SCD mags (which I did a lot), buying from one of the two "local" card shops I had within 30 miles of me, or buying at the 1-3 local/reginal shows I would go to. I didn't attend my first National until 2002.

The price of packs: I bought more packs in 1984 as a 10 year old than any other year. Between baseball and football I probably ripped through two cases of wax, and did so buying 3-20 packs at a time, never a full box. Packs were $0.30 each so for $1.00 I could get three packs, pay tax, and get a couple pennies back. In the last ten years I've paid as much as $500.00 for packs I've ripped. I never imagined doing that back in the day.

I think there are a few big changes that play a significant role:
-the relationship between players/teams and the kids who followed them as opposed to now is a big part of it. When I was growing up in the ‘70’s in central NJ, kids were either Yankees or Mets fans for the most part because that was what was on the radio and tv. If you wanted the score of a Twins-A’s game, you’d need to rely on the post-game show of the local game or wait until the paper the next day. And given that local favoritism, a pack with Chris Chambliss or Fred Stanley was better than a pack with Willie McCovey or Dave Concepcion. And,
-those packs were cheap and plentiful. Local deli had wax packs behind the counter. Woolworth/McCrorys/Two Guys/KayBee and Toys R Us always had rack packs and even a 12 year old could afford them. In part, that’s because there were no
-parallel sets, chase cards, intentional errors, autographs not to mention multiple releases every year which have rendered ‘base’ cards essentially worthless.

I think without exposing kids to baseball in that manner (and not even mentioning the relative rise in other sports), you don’t get kids interested in learning more about Goudeys, T206 or even Bowman.

how collecting has changed
 

Money, of course, but I've been in and out of this since I was a child. What I remember best about, say, 1958, is that you couldn't find people who did this.
Conrad Anderson, who sold autographs; George Husby, cards; and Goody Goldfadden, who sold EVERYTHING, advertised thru TSN and Baseball Digest, but that was it.

There were hobby papers, like The Sport Hobbyist (that was Charles Brooks in Detroit), but they mostly looked like they were printed on the grade school mimeograph machine and you never knew when they were going to come out.

You started having regional conventions in the mid 1970s and the hobby papers got better and actually came out on time.

And with big money, serious auction houses became involved.

I think about those weird old guys who started all of this 90 years ago and wonder how they ever found one another.

You can find more information from five minutes of looking at Net54 than you could have discovered in ten years of nosing around in 1965 or '70.

Money. Graded cards. Either/or. Neither one good, unless you're using the hobby as an investment and have deep pockets. I've come to realize that there are WAY MORE raw cards people than I could ever imagine based on the majority of threads here.

Ja about to get a lengthy suspension. I’d imagine pricey purchases of his bogus gold refractor cards are well under water. For good.

Where you get cards. As a kid I would always go to the grocery with my mom in hopes she would buy me a grocery rack pack, we rode our bikes to the corner store to buy packs and every time we were at the mall we went to the drug store to buy packs. Sadly none of those options are available today.

I am convinced eBay is the source of a lot of the increased AH inventory. I did a column on eBay's seller punishment system last week. If you are unlucky enough to get caught in it (which I have due to accidentally double-listing some cards from a set break), you end up paying more to eBay than to an AH (19.25% of the entire sale including tax and shipping vs. 20% of the hammer price). I terminated 90% of my eBay listings this week and plan to populate my store with overpriced BINs until the subscription runs out in February. FWIW, anything you see in my eBay store (Exhibitman) as a BIN is available for the asking at a 20% discount (25% if you pay by Zelle) off eBay. Oh, and I sent over 100 cards to REA for this month's auction that i might otherwise have sold through my eBay store. All I can say to eBay is

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Jay, I recall that Terry Knause and son were the go to guys for nice 19th century material. I guess they have faded from the scene, perhaps because of the difficulty finding new stuff.