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#1
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Who is the biggest culprit?
For the decline of bb card collecting?
1) Price Guides (Namely Beckett) for assigning monetary value to cards 2) Grading Companies (Looking your way PSA) for overemphasizing condition 3) MLB for turning baseball's pastimes into 2 leagues of haves and have-nots 4) Technology (ex: video games) for making card collecting obsolete and/or less relevant 5) Various card companies for flooding the market during the 80s-modern era/overpricing 6) Other In my opinion, price guides, turning the hobby into a business. Your thoughts? Last edited by mintacular; 01-18-2012 at 10:24 PM. |
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#3
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IMO, it is the card companies for pricing the modern packs to where kids can't afford them.
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#4
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Whoops, my response was more about the decline of baseball in general. I think the decline in card collecting is partly cost and partly the overwhelming amount of cards that are available.
I don't know much about the other sports. Is there an equal decline in football/basketball/hockey collecting? Last edited by packs; 01-18-2012 at 10:37 PM. |
#5
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nah, there still are plenty of packs that can be bought for a buck or two. Kids just don't care about cards, nothing exciting about them for kids nowadays with the internet, i-pads, video games, portable video games, smart phones, etc. technology has killed kids collecting cards |
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Agree with Bilko
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#7
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Packs should be 50 cents each with 15-20 cards in them and MLB should subsidize the cost if necessary. The future to ANYTHING is children, not middle-aged men. Cards introduce the sport unlike anything else. The other big thing is 9pm playoff games? They need to be earlier so kids can watch and see them end! |
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It is inaccurate IMO to think of the card collecting public as one market. I see three: vintage [pre WWII], boomer [1945-1980] and modern, and each reacts very differently to various things.
For me, two things have greatly diminished my interest in vintage and boomer era cards: prices and grading. I am unable to purchase many of the vintage cards I want--simply cannot afford them. That kills my interest in collecting many of the mainstay issues. On boomer era cards, I am so turned off by the TPG thing and resulting astronomical prices for minute and usually undetectable differences between cards that my interest has fallen off dramatically.
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Read my blog; it will make all your dreams come true. https://adamstevenwarshaw.substack.com/ Or not... |
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#10
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As a kid the price of a pack of cards mimic'd a price of a candy bar 5 cents and then 10 cents (starting in 69 I think). I think a candy bar is now around $1, the few times I see Cards at a convenience store of five and dime, they seem to be in the $4 range. Too much, I think for a little kid.
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My wantlist http://www.oldbaseball.com/wantlists...tag=bdonaldson Member of OBC (Old Baseball Cards), the longest running on-line collecting club www.oldbaseball.com |
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T206's Graded low-mid 219/520 T201's SGC/PSA 2-5 50/50 T202's SGC/PSA 2-5 10/132 1938 Goudey Graded VG range 37/48 |
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Its so great to love all the New York teams in all sports, particularly the YANKEES. |
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For me personally, there is way too many new sets and subsets being created. I lost alot of interest in cards around 1992 and shifted back into my first love, coin collecting. It just got too hard to collect everything and then all the limited subsets like the copper, bronze, chrome, autos, it just got too crazy. Also the fact that all the new shiny stuff cost more to produce, so the cost to us went up also. At 3 dollars a pack of cards, gas stations, 7-elevens, and other places stopped carrying them. I miss the good ole wax packs and the days of only 3 different sets to collect.
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#14
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Other-In both the current and vintage markets, the seller has priced himself out of his own market. Auctions, in part, have ben popular simply because of the chance of pitting two bidders against one another. If it is a dishonest/rigged market, you are bidding against a phantom.
Now, a lousy economy can help neutralize the seller causing him to drop his price. If he considers an auction as his backup, the risk is whether the percentage to auction his goods wipes out his incentive to part with the card. Last edited by Brian Van Horn; 01-18-2012 at 11:02 PM. |
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I blame shill bidding.
__________________
My avatar is a sketch by my son who is an art school graduate. Some of his sketches and paintings are at https://www.jamesspaethartwork.com/ He is available to do custom drawings in graphite, charcoal and other media. He also sells some of his works as note cards/greeting cards on Etsy under JamesSpaethArt. |
#16
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Hmmm,
All the new technology to interest kids today is a big reason kids don't collect cards anymore. With the ipods, itouch, ixxx, computer games, kids don't gravitate toward "boring" cards anymore.
The overwhelming variety of cards is just too much these days - tough to stay focused on one set of afforadable cards. The market is flooded with current collectible cards However, without technology, ie ebay, the hobby may be just about dead. Imagine this hobby without ebay - dreadful scary. And like it or not, third party grading has helped prop up the hobby. |
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Market flooding
FWIW, I think a great deal of blame is placed at the feet of the card companies and the major league sports and unions that licensed too many products. They killed the golden goose by overfeeding it.
When sports card collecting boomed (about when Topps stopped being the only legit choice, in the early 1980s), cards became innovative and interesting and visually appealing. Buyers (still mostly kids) appreciated the competitive look of the new manufacturers' products. When one or two experimented with short-subsets, insert cards, redemption cards, etc., collecting became a lottery (I don't care what that idiot judge in the midwest (?) said -- kids ripped open packs looking for the valuable insert cards, not to find the #377 card they need to finish their sets; it was gambling, pure and simple). Once buying and searching packs, boxes, cases, became a money-making proposition, kids got squeezed out physically and monetarily. And then there were just too many cards to collect. I heard a stat a while back that I think is illustrative: in 1955 There was one mainstream Mickey Mantle card. In 1997 there were 135 Mantle cards issued by various manufacturers, all in subsets, chase cards, etc. The packs became valuable, and then were priced accordingly, even if value was generated by way of a manufactured scarcity (such as the new Sport Kings cards). The market got overheated, flooded, and expensive, and kids could no longer keep up with the dealers who would buy up and break cases to find chase cards, then sell them for more than the cases were sold for. Point in illustration: I remember very clearly a dealer friend breaking cases of some basketball card to find the "insert" Shaq & Jabbar card (and he knew how to count the boxes down from the top to find the right box). The rest of the case was, essentially, trash, so he pretty much handed it out like candy. The Shaq card sold for more than he spent on the case. I know there are many more examples of this. So I say #5, FWIW. |
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Of course, as Jeff and Peter said, fraud in this hobby is through the roof. That's going to cause a lot of collectors to take up a new hobby.
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#19
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Re: market flooding
And not just kids ripping packs open looking for inserts. I stopped going to our local card shop as I got tired of listening to blowhard adults talking about some 1/1 auto card they pulled out of a $100 pack and then flipped on ebay to make some cash.
Also pretty depressing to watch people come into the shop with what looked like their paycheck and buy tons of pack. They'd rip them open, find nothing of great value, and then sit there with their head in their hands wondering how they were going to explain what happened to their wife. If you don't think that's a gambling habit, you haven't watched people at 7-eleven play scratch-off lottery games. jeff |
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I blame:
The X games (most kids follow this kinda thing and can tell you all the major players and can't name most baseball teams) Over saturation of the product And scandal. Those three are my opinion.
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I have counted the stitches on a baseball more than once.[/B] My PM box might be full. Email: jcfowler6@zoominternet.net Want list: Prewar Pirates items 1909 Pirates BF2 Wagner Cracker Jack Wagner and Clarke Love the hobby. |
#21
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To summarize
To summarize, "eff" the kids, if they don't like cards that's their issue
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#22
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I don't believe the hobby nor baseball is going down like some detractors think they will even with the Astros in the AL West. And the popularity of the NFL shouldn't be compared with MLB because they are two completely different things. There are definitely much more specialties in this hobby then many people are aware of. I'm mostly a vintage card collector, but I never get tired of meeting other collectors who are experts in areas I don't collect. The modern side is much more diverse then we think. I met a guy who collects current non sports stuff and he was telling me how different that crowd views grading than we do. Modern football collectors are said to not be into collecting sets just draft picks like Cam Newton and soon to be Andrew Luck. My father pulled Mantle cards for pennies on the dollar as a kid and grandma threw them all away like many collectors here, but when I was a kid, I was a fan of Griffey and Frank Thomas but could not afford their cards because they were expensive. Now that their cards are cheap, I'm collecting them now. A lot of guys I grew up with have cards that are worth nothing, but we have endless conversations about the hobby from when we were kids. "How much is that '86 Donruss Canseco?....$2?? Man, I had two of them when they were $100 a piece--I was a huge Canseco fan." or I'll hear something like this. "How much is that '90 Leaf Frank Thomas?..."$7? If you find one at that price buy me one. I wanted that card for years as a kid, but it was $80 at the time!"
The hobby will always be there but the way the generations view it will be different and that's not always a bad thing. Craig |
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Completely agreed about the specialties, or niches. What we all view as phases, some people will settle on one or another as their main focus.. So yes, modern collecting is all across the board, which is one of the reason's that the industry might seem worse off than it really is...Because no one product really dominates.. Last edited by novakjr; 01-20-2012 at 08:53 PM. |
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Oversaturation
Grading
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[FONT="Lucida Sans Unicode"]CampyFan39 |
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Read my blog; it will make all your dreams come true. https://adamstevenwarshaw.substack.com/ Or not... Last edited by Exhibitman; 01-23-2012 at 06:48 AM. |
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removing the product.
A true collector card was always issued FREE with a product or service of some kind. Issues other than that were called "Collector Issues" and usually were issued in boxed sets ie TCMA, Exhibits, R316, Berk Ross, etc. and usually suffered demand wise (too easy to collect/buy a set) Now almost every card is a "Collector Issue" and is the product |
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