Will Stamp Collecting Survive?

Mrita75,

Have fun sharing our hobby with your son. Try giving your son a few covers to explore. It worked with my son. It gets the focus on the material more than their monetary value.

Thanks. I think the cover route might work well with my 9 year old. He writes letters and mails them to a little friend (though it has been a while) that left his school He is more hands on and tactile. we will see...

The 12 year old -the adult in the family (not really even kidding). No joke, he learned all the flags of the world by 3.5 year of age and when we were out and about would see designs in the backs of chairs etc. and say - look mami "the flag of Jamaica" - I thought it was cute and funny - but I was like hmmm - maybe this is not so common.

As you can imagine - he learns online mostly through quizlets, Khan Academy, wiki - different interactive apps. I have looked for a stamp App similar to the Flag and other Geo ones, but haven't found anything yet that would catch his pre-teen attention. Currently he is waiting to find out if he made it to the Texas State Finals of the National Geo Bee - we find out on 3/2 - so right now he is hyper focused on learning all he can on Geography, Biomes, Import/export, Oceans, rivers, regions (he knows all the regions in Russia, China, Canada and Brazil). Once we get past that, I am going to bring him back in to my stampy world and see what clicks.

Boy just read most of this thread and it was quite a read.

Nora I think it is wonderful that your son loves History and Geography so much. Let me know if he wants to get into stamp collecting as I have lots of spares.

As for the survival of Stamp Collecting from what I see in my small city of Fredericton New Brunswick Canada I think that it does indeed stand a chance.

As President of our small club I have had the pleasure of welcoming 4 new members since Christmas. One is middle aged, two are seniors (husband and wife) and one is an 8 year old who happed to come with her dad one meeting and got hooked.

We host 2 local stamp shows a year and often have kids browsing the free stamp table we provide for them. When I go speak to them most tell me that they collect animals or flowers but a few like learning about the countries and history. These kids are usually under the age of 12.

I myself love stamps. My budget is limited but I sometimes will splurge on pricy stamp to fill some of the earlier pages in my Album. My fellow members often help me with this.

This year our club is hosting The 2020 Royal and though I am just a little overwhelmed at taking on such a task I am exited to show the rest of Canada and the world what our little club can accomplish.

So when you ask will stamp collecting survive; my answer is I sure hope so and I am going to do my very best to help ensure it.

Dianne

DE it has been a long time hope everything is well on the other side of the boarder.

The basic answer to the question is yes. No matter what unless stamps start self destructing, stamp collecting will survive to the end of time.

What will not survive is some of the ways we buy, sell or socialize with stamps, such as clubs etc.

The number of collectors may fluctuate. New people will enter and long time veterans will pass on. Collections will be sold, pass on donated and even trashed /destroyed. It will keep cycling and changing as it always has.

NOTE my first experience with stamps came from a collection that was tossed out in the woods with other junk.the stamps interested me, I saved what I could then the rest was history.

To me age has nothing to do with it. Most new collectors I have meet started in their 20's or 30's. I don't know one person under the age of 18 that is a collector. In fact I started at around age 8 or 9 and over the next 50 years never personaly met a collector under the age of 18.

Things have changed, companies like Harris are long gone, stamp stores are gone, heck it is hard enough to even find an album in any store.

However stamps survive and are traded and sold probably as much as they were when I was a kid. Prices have certainly gone up if only on a select few.

I love Candian stamps. I was a big fan of the cloth flag, I have ten. I have the bear, whale and many more. To me they are much more exciting and interesting than what we turn out in the States.

So I guess if your a dealer you may see the hobby through different glasses than I do. In addition if you tried to make the hobby an investment you certainly see the hobby different than I do. If you have a club your members are older, maybe, but I guarantee you there are more young people in the hobby. The hard part is finding them and getting them to join. I was never a stamp club person.

I don't know why but I just renewed my membership with APS. Maybe because I enjoy the monthly magazine. It is never a sure thing that I will renew each year. Sad I don't find much value for me, not saying they dont have a lot to offer to the right collectors.

So stamp collecting will move into the future with out any problems. It will just change just like my personal collection has evolved much differently than when I started.

Change is a good thing.

My local club set a record for membership last month (and has been in existence since 1937).

This community is incredibly strong, thriving, and also is growing.

Here is a chart showing the number of unique human Stamp Smarter visitors per month since it start about 6 years ago.


If anyone is saying that the hobby is not healthy they are not looking in the right places.
Don

The number of Stampsmarter.com visits is a pretty good metric for how the hobby is doing. I believe those visitors pretty much cover the spectrum, from newcomers seeking information to seasoned collectors doing a deep dive on material they have or might acquire.

That is awesome Don! woo hoo.

https://goscf.com/t/42254&whichpage=14#633037

As you can see from Don's chart, things really exploded after I put on my StampSmarter t-shirt, and traipsed around NAPEX in July.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Nora, really glad that your 12-year-old enjoys collecting. I tried to get both of my daughters interested in collecting when they were around the same age. Daughter #1 showed no interest whatsoever while daughter #2 feigned interest to please me. She collected Disney stamps for a few months, then discovered makeup. <heavy sigh>

What part of Texas are you in? There's a great stamp store in San Antonio that I frequented for years before moving to Colorado.

Scott

Hi Scott, I am in the Houston area. However, I have a lot of family in SA and lived there for 10 years - I go often. What is the name of the stamp store? Id love to check out an actual store.

Well, hopefully my boys will keep the hobby going...

Sure it will survive ......we are all waiting for the "next big event in Philately "

Let me explain ------The first big event was the President FDR collecting stamps ,second big event was H.E.Harris advertising brought in a lot of collectors . The third big event was the Inflation period of the early 1970 which seen huge jumps in prices for collecting/investing . The fourth big event was ebay {I sold tons and I means tons of mixture boxes of stamps }everybody was making money selling atamp and buying stamps .

So you can see different events cause our hobby to become poplar and increase attention. These are the "events" that will carry us forward .....we are in a waiting cycle for the next event .

That will be the robots in Amazon warehouses beginning their collections, then

GeoffHa ---I thought you would say the Coronavirus --people would bunker down and stay home and work on stamps .

Morning Don and all,

Is your metric all visits to the page by month or unique individuals that visited (one tic to a customer)? Anyway, the trend is in our favor and very encouraging.