Philately Dies??

There is a show next month in Crystal on July 17, 18, and 19. The website is www.stampsminnesota.com. zyou'll be able to judge for yourself.

I am going to predict that we will soon be seeing some new high-denomination stamps coming from Greece. Perhaps denominated in rubles. New stuff to collect! Philately is not dead. Plenty of us AARP members at shows...this is true.

Philately is not dead by any means. Young people as an example care nothing about CD's, cameras, clock radios, and telephones (non cell). You do and so do I. To attract them I feel is impossible.

Well if there are no young ones joining then philately is dead.

we need to actively promote at the grade school level.

I disagree. Young people don't have the money to spend on stamps or the maturity to enjoy stamps for historic, political, or artistic interest. The future of the hobby lies in people at or near retirement age who have leisure time, interest in more sedentary or social hobbies, disposable income, and enough education and life experience to have interest in history, politics, art and stamp technology. APS recently did a survey of membership and found that most members are 50+, and I believe it has been that way for decades. The hobby should invest in people who are approximately age 45. Those are the people who will join clubs and societies, go to shows and spend, prepare exhibits, etc.

There is nothing wrong with sending stamped letters to young people, talking about what stamps are, walking through a stamp album with them or even teaching and supervising the Boy Scout merit badge with a troop. But societies or clubs that spend larger dollars on larger recruitment projects directed at youth will find a low, low rate of return. Age 45-65 is where they should go. Indeed, my experience is that established adult collectors aren't really interested in spending the many hours it takes to interest a 12-year-old or 16-year-old in the hobby precisely because of the low rate of return. It feels like wasted time because they don't stay in the hobby.

CJ I think you hit the nail on the head. Best to target those middle-age who are looking for a hobby to help them destress from the crazy reality of 21st century life. More likely to get people who will collect for the long term than targeting only the under-18 community whose attention will be drawn to many other drains on their limited income as the years go forward.

And this is what happened to me. I was recruited happily to join clubs in middle age and enjoy the extra leap in knowledge and collecting gained in doing so.

But to get to that point, I had to make the decision to choose stamps rather than collecting cars, fishing gear or golf equipment. I chose stamps because I collected them as a kid and revived my old stamp collection that I hadn't touched in decades. And I think that is a common theme.

very common theme Jim.

But there will be tons of middle-aged at some point that never did collect as kids. I think all of us at some point enjoy "reliving" parts of our youth as adults. Be it stamps, baseball cards, video games, or whatever. All of the above for me. I went through a long stage of my mid 20s to about 40 with no interest in any of that because I was doing other things. Little by little, it all came back.

Why not drop the age targeting, income targeting, etc, and just look for people who have an existing interest than can be expressed & satisfied thru philately? There are magazines, societies, conferences, etc, for people with these interests.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

That would probably be a good place to start and I believe you'll actually see the occasional ad from Mystic or Kenmore, et. al. in some magazines like that. I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that interest in things like history, geography and foreign cultures, etc, run a lot higher among stamp collectors than among non-collectors.

There are a lot of good stamp articles on Wikipedia, but it's too bad there aren't more (any?) with a star on them so they can get front page rotation. Coin articles appear on Wiki's home page with some regularity. It would be cool to get a few stamp articles with that kind of visibility. Being the knowledge hound that I am, I click on that home page article probably over half the time, even if it's a subject I'm pretty familiar with.

To sink the hook in further, I would think that crash covers & first flight covers would be fair bait for aviation buffs.

More people are using the internet now to correspond. I wonder what effect that will have and whether used stamps or rather new stamps with interesting cancellations will have more value.

there have been some great points made.

I find it interesting that no one is proposing that stamp societies produce herds of you tube videos on the ins and outs and how-tos of stamp collecting.

Why is that?