Proposed Merger Of The APS And Asda

That is very interesting.

Even though I constantly strive to see the best in my fellow humans (no snickering please) I must concur that a sudden outbreak of honesty, morals and ethics does seem highly unlikely.

Now if we could only see the ASDA data.

i will repeat my prior warning that any agreement , if consummated between APS and ASDA keep separate financials and should have an ironclad escape clause for the APS.

Don's analysis here of the distribution of disciplinary actions and the declining trend is really interesting. I suppose there might be some sort of one-off explanation for the high numbers in the 90s - like a a prioritized effort to get rid of bad apples, but barring that it does make one wonder what's going on.

Are standards being loosened in order to preserve membership? Some other explanation?

It surely is and it raises many questions.

Given the number of dealers/sellers, if the APS disciplinary action numbers are single digits (or digit) and the ASDA is similar (we don't know but I can make an educated guess) than who are the "police" when it comes to bad actors? It really only leaves the internet platforms that support these dealers/sellers. Really?!

And if, as Don points out, the few disciplinary actions that we see are non-dealer/seller related THAT is a real problem because we know that there is no shortage of bad actors out there.

IMO as stated earlier in this thread if effort and funds are going to be expended to make for a better buyer environment, they should go towards educating collectors at all levels and providing easily accessible and affordable expertization services.

Such efforts should reach well beyond the organization's dues paying memberships. I believe that if anything would be seen as providing value it would be such efforts and that would increase membership numbers more than any "logo" partnership ever could.

We have all seen the trimmed stamps and the bogus overprints. Why not make a concerted effort to concentrate on an area or two to show how valuable and interesting detecting fraud and fakery can be?

If there are to be collaborative efforts, they should start with the major selling platforms such as Ebay and NOT be transactional partnerships such as the one with HipStamp and the APS but instead give value by cleaning up the house. I understand that these types of efforts have been undertaken in the past and withered on the vine due to, from what I understand, the platforms reticence. Is it worth another go?

In most cases, complaints are initiated by other members. The common exceptions are failure to make payments to the Society or felony charges brought by law enforcement.

The complaints process is due process and is not always resolved by disciplinary action. Complaints can be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties, but that is guided by the member making the complaint. We maintain records of all complaints for future reference.

Having said that, my emphasis on bad actors online is that very few complaints come to the APS through online sales. And the increase of online transactions can be with anonymous or unknown sellers through one of the platforms. Pushing for badging online and engaging with HipStamp and the ASDA is designed to create a better complaint process than what buyers receive today and some level of accountability.

I understand we can't monitor every transaction, etc., or find every bad actor, but we should offer collectors a choice, which is what we're trying to build.

As for the ASDA merger proposal, now that the ASDA Board has actually responded, there are some information gaps we need to fill. We will need a better financial picture than what I see in the publicly available financial statements, deeper membership information, and liabilities present and future. I readily accept there limitations on my philatelic knowledge, but I was chief negotiator for a governor and ran a $4 billion enterprise for four years. Besides one incident in 2009, I've had a pretty good run. I promise to use those skills in this discussion. If, after all of those steps, this is not a good deal for the APS membership, we cannot proceed and you'll hear it from me first.

Scott, thanks for sticking with this conversation and for your clarifications and explanations. I'm a newer APS member and new on this forum and this is all very enlightening. Collecting is quite a bit different from when I was a teenager in the 70s!

(I believe) if you want to be a dealer at the big ASP summer show you have to be an APS member. While you might not have to be a member of anything to be a dealer at a smaller show, being smaller it is easier for the organizers to get a feel for whether the dealers are ethical or not (not that every organizer cares). Online is a completely different game. Gazillions of sellers, virtually no barrier to entry, screen names, no faces to look into etc.

I view Don's data as just reflecting the trend of the hobby. The membership is less so that would account for part of it but it also means that there are fewer APS member to APS member transactions. The buyers and sellers are using ebay more and not using the APS discipline system. I do not have a preference to buy from an APS dealer either.

Still rearranging the deck chairs on the the Titanic and crying about the evil people in the stamp trade .

We got a great philatelic base with EBAY ,the problem is lack of development in that base to advance up to become educated collectors ,we are leaving too many to die on the vine . The APS is a strong top of the triangle with experience and organization but the failure is to bring those people who buy and show interest at the base to continue up . No joke I had 6 new first time buyers with zero feedback so they are for the first time buying something on EBAY ,this last month for stamps and my guess other sellers are seeing the same in the market place . { just a note here ----I included extra stamps ,just to make their first time more fun } .

. GET BACK TO BEING A EDUCATION ORGANIZATION ,maybe start up a STAMP college .

A plan should be made to advance those new collectors up the ladder of becoming life time philatelist .

Floor,
We can attract dozens of new hobbyists each day, but retention remains a huge issue. I am sure there are many retention components, APS would do well to use some surveys and try to put a plan together that addresses the retention survey findings. Off the top of my head, I would say the following might be part of the retention challenges;
- high cost of entry to the hobby
- inability of catalogs to list accurate market values
- significant risks in getting ripped off
-setting expectations so that hobbyists does not expect to get rich but rather enjoy the hobby for intrinsic enjoyment
I am sure there are others things that cause folks to leave the hobby.
Don

I would put "risks in getting ripped off" at the top of the concerns list and the setting of expectations is tied directly to it.

I would wager that having a bad buying experience has led more collectors to leave the hobby than any other one factor.

Any collector that is going to put anything beyond minimal effort and money into their hobby should at least expect a fair return on their materials and that means that what they purchased is what it is supposed to be. That is not an unreasonable expectation and is a linchpin of advancing in their collecting efforts. At some point most of us have filled those easy spaces/gaps and contemplate taking the next step which is acquiring pricier materials. That does not necessarily mean jumping to thousand-dollar stamps/covers and those are frankly not in most collections. I am talking about items approaching or in the three-figure category, perhaps even lower.

And so, we need an environment where the odds of getting ripped off are minimized. The lowish hundred-dollar category IMO is the most problematic because at those price points expertizing can be seen as eating up too much of the acquisition cost.

There are few parties within philately that can have a direct impact on cleaning up and making safer the philatelic market and they are philatelic organizations such as the APS, expertizing bodies and the internet marketplace platforms themselves. Other less direct players are forums such as this one and fellow collectors.

My personal experience is that none of the aforementioned direct impact parties have been effective in policing bad actors. In the case of philatelic organizations, I believe that failure is due to not wanting to acknowledge the extent of the problem for fear of turning people off of the hobby. In addition, there is the ever-present issue of not wanting to bite the hand that feeds which brings us to the next player, the internet platforms. Of all the parties the internet platforms could have the most impact on cleaning house, but they are all fee based and are reticent to be aggressive with sellers that have huge market share of the philatelic categories. They also sell so much more than stamps and what is important to us as collectors of stamps is likely not very high upon their list of priorities. Most of us are aware of the Philip Ryle/Cartel saga that has gone on for many years on Ebay. So that leaves two missed opportunities for improvements. So, what of the expertizing bodies? They are ancillary to the marketplace and are a discretionary option. As such they really cannot enforce anything. They are a valuable tool however if their use became mandatory at some dollar value trigger point.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with where we always are, spinning our wheels. I have been collecting on and off since around 1970 and fully engaged since the 1990's. Almost thirty years into my philatelic journey and there has been no turning point of making the marketplace a safer space. For myself, I have been screwed enough at this point to have divested of all of my real collections and enjoy talking about the hobby now and collecting things that hold no financial risk. I have had bad experiences with everyone from major brick and mortar auction houses to tiny online platform sellers. When there have been problems it left a bad taste in my mouth and eventually, I folded my cards. I never looked at my collections as an investment, but I did not advance my collecting as an altruistic charitable endeavor either.

How many other people have also ended up in the same situation as me?

PS: Sorry that my post has no answers but at this point it does not seem to me that the parties that could do something are seriously not interested.

Unfortunately, the APS can't do much about those. Most people start collecting stamps by soaking them off of incoming mail, but that's hardly a thing anymore. That's just the way society is anymore and the way the USPS has operated for decades. Catalogs are beyond their ability to control too. In fact, catalogs are almost irrelevant anymore, I wouldn't be surprised to see most of them out of business in the next decade or so. I can't remember the last time I pulled out a catalog for anything. There are risks, but there are risks in anything and the buyer has had to beware online since the beginning. That's nothing new. The expectations thing might be something we can work on but most people I run into these days, most young people anyhow, they automatically think in terms of "how much money will I make" on everything. I don't think a lot of them even understand what hobbies are. They think it's all an investment and the second they realize that's not what it is, they stop being interested.

Of all of them, only the last might be something that the APS can try to work with and even there, you might not be able to overcome cultural norms these days. The idea of something done entirely for your own personal enjoyment with no return on "investment" seems to be a really foreign concept to some these days.

(As an aside, some 25 years ago I dove headlong into the hobby after having a bad experience with a dealer. I became hellbent on not letting him ruin it for me and I haven't looked back. The dimension that philately has added to my life is immeasurable.)

Just want to state up-front that I'm all for supporting the APS's mission. And I'm all for seeing the hobby flourish and (somehow) reduce people's bad experiences with sellers. But I just don't see how that can be accomplished via this proposal. We're now 5 pages deep into this conversation and it's still unclear what this merger would accomplish. Can someone summarize it in 2 or 3 sentences? I've tried but I can't do it.

From the proposal: "Uniting the Hobby.... [this] idea is modeled after the American Numismatic Association, where collectors and dealers work together as one for the health of the hobby and integrity in the marketplace."

Unfortunately, the merger proposal doesn't offer any details of the model. So in an effort to understand for myself, I visited the ANA website (https://www.money.org/) from the link provided in the APS article on the proposed merger (https://stamps.org/news/c/news/cat/...06e02cccbc).

I figured a good place to start would be About > Our Mission. It's a very brief read, and the takeaway is that that ANA is an educational organization. There's no mention of collector/dealer cooperation/collaboration.

Under About > Member Benefits you'll find a beautifully done PDF brochure. I'd urge the APS powers-that-be to have a look at this and note the production value. Slick, but not too slick. Great photography that depicts younger people (I say this to address laments about the inability to attract younger people to the hobby). And so on.

After spending a few minutes reading that (and writing this), I'm wondering how much deeper I'd have to dig to understand the structure of the model on which the proposed merger is based.

Back to the proposal itself. There's this notion of (quote) "the dealer community." Given how the proposal describes a proliferation of online sellers operating without accountability, there really isn't any such "community." And how could there be? What's to stop philatelically-ignorant Joe Estate Sale from listing his "rare finds" on ebay with the caveat of "I don't know anything about stamps, so returns are not accepted if I've inadvertently misdescribed what I'm selling"? If he was called on the carpet post-sale for selling a reperfed stamp, how would he know the difference? This situation puts the seller at the mercy of the buyer precisely because of the seller's ignorance. And who's going to resolve that dispute? Ebay? What do they know about reperfed stamps? Considering that ebay's philatelic listings come under the heading of "Postal (sic) Stamps" it's pretty clear that they're not very invested in philatelic specifics.

The truth is, anyone can hawk anything on ebay as long as it conforms to their guidelines. Thus, it's entirely unclear how any organization or institution can address this point of the proposal:

"Failing to adapt and assert our collective membership value in the digital marketplace will erode consumer confidence and allow bad actors to profit from unsuspecting buyers."

If there's a solution, it begins (on ebay at least) with their commitment to taking user complaints seriously. But they don't. I related a story about this several posts up. Even getting the complaint process started is difficult. Just try it for yourself. No, really, take a minute and make the attempt: Find an ebay item and click on "report this item." You will immediately be confronted by the difficulty of actually reporting whatever you have to say about it.

I am also in the dark as to what is happening.
Could Mr English please tell us ( in plain, everyday English, no pun intended ) why the APS is trying to do this? In other words, what is in it for the APS and more important, for the membership?


Peter

The one thing I can think of is both organizations compete (along with Linn's) for the same small pool of writers for their magazines.

As for the idea that "it supposedly worked for coins, it should work for stamps" - maybe, maybe not. Different personalities involved that may or may not work together.

Certainly different agendas and I don't understand how joining up with an ASDA that is intent on protecting the likes of one of our "favorite" questionable dealers is a good idea.