The real reason for the decline of card collecting
There is an article in the NY Times today, which talks about the decline of people investing in baseball cards. The shame of the situation is that the remaining card companies (Topps and Upper Deck) are not making it easy for adults or kids to collect baseball cards anymore. They are not easily accessible, and the market is so saturated with different products that it is impossible for a person to know what to collect. For instance a quick search of Cardboard Connection lists 39 different sets, which you can buy and collect of 2013 baseball cards, 25 which are branded Topps. That does not even take into consideration the other sports and trading cards that are available, further muddying the novice collector and deterring them from possibly making their first purchase. Yes it was supposed to be a better investment than the stock market in the 1990's when cards were flooding the market, but then there was a sharp decline, and now the card companies are complaining that the market is not returning, but yet they seem to be doing everything they can to kill demand, and continuing to produce more supply than is probably needed.
When I was a kid, you get baseball cards everywhere. You could not walk into a gas stations, a drug store, a department store or any other major retail establishment and not find baseball cards. I used to make treks to different stores across town, just to find an elusive Johnny Bench or Ozzie Smith card, because my local haunts were not producing the cards I need to complete my series. Little did I know that I need to go somewhere like Tennessee or Montana, light years away from Binghamton New York, to find those missing cards, but I was on a mission, and boy was it fun. Today, my kids don't understand baseball card collecting and don't understand why I still do it to this day. Neither do I really
A few years back I was speaking to the owner of a local convenience store and he happened to have a box of basketball cards. I asked him why he had them, and why he does not regularly carry trading cards. He said he got this box at a deep discount, not telling me what he paid, so it was worth putting them on his counter so he could move these cards. He said there is simply not enough profit in trading cards as a whole to regularly give them any space in his store. This got me thinking about it, and my town, like my others, as had a recent influx of super drug stores, huge CVS or Walgreens, or Rite Aid, or whatever, that have aisles and aisles of all the crap you could ever need. As my wife was shopping for something I started wondering the aisles, figuring one of these huge stores might have baseball cards. While they had 3 different aisles for candy, not a single trading card could be found and this leads me to the final reason why the industry is in a decline, the product is simply hard to find and not at all cost effective. Its almost as if they don't want you to buy it and if you do, they don't give you a lot of value for your hard earned money.
The Stamford CT area is a fairly large community with a population of close to 120k people. However, the only places where I have been able to find cards reguarly is at the Target and the local comic book shop. If you go a little further north there are two Walmarts in Norwalk CT where you can get cards as well. However in both Target and Walmart, they are located off in the corner near the cash registers, and in one of the Walmarts, they are actually next to the cigarettes, which makes them seem almost forbidden where you need to ask an associate for assistance in selecting your pack of cards. All the cards are thrown together on the wall in a singular display so finding what you are looking for, in my case the plain old regular Topps Series 1/2, is especially difficult.
Then if you are lucky enough to find the set you are looking for, there are additional choices. There are the small packs of 8-12 cards, for about $1.99 each. There are 30-36 cards for $5.99. And there are 81 cards for $9.99.
Why 8-12 cards you may ask? Well because in every pack, there may or may not be a special insert, which ultimately means even if you choose to collect a particular set, then you are also getting additional inserts that you might not even want (like me). So if there is an insert you might only get 8 cards, which actually increases the base cost ranges from $0.17 to $0.25 per card, when the secondary market for the majority of these cards goes for between 5-10 cents, especially when you can buy the complete set of 660 cards for $49.99 (or $.08/card) at the end of the year. It really seems to me that is the real goal for the companies.
Back in 2007 I started reading Ben Henry's baseball card blog and decided to start buying individual packs again for the first time since 1982, when my original collection ended. I really enjoyed opening them up, seeing who I got, eyeing a few stats of a key players, and ultimately (mild case of OCD?) putting them into numerical order to determine which cards were outstanding. At the end of the season, I would find online shops like http://www.baseball-cards.com// or http://www.baseballcardzone.com/ that would sell me individual cards to help me complete my sets.
Each year since then, I find myself buying less and less individual packs simply because it feels like I am getting less cards, less value and more crap, plus my wife keeps telling me I am wasting our money, which might be true too. It is a shame, because as my kids gets older, I am seeing none of their friends interested in pursuing this hobby, I see only a few of them actually following the game itself (but that is a whole other story), so unless the card companies drastically change their strategies in how they are pricing and how they are marketing to their consumers, then this article is correct that there are going to continual to be a shrinking market. Eventually it will just be Lee Goldinger and I trading cards back and forth.
In the meantime, I am still looking for a 1984 Jim Beattie (#288) and the Toronto Blue Jays Team Card (#606). so if you have an extra one of these laying around hit me up and lets see if we can work a trade so I can mark that set complete
1 comment:
I remember Collecting Baseball cards as a kid, I still have them too!
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