Stamp Collecting, The News Of It's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated.

Morning KGV Collector and all,

Thanks for saying something I have observed for years, "Us sellers have priced ourselves out of business to put it bluntly." The cost of doing business plus a reasonable profit margin for your efforts has driven the bottom value of what a dealer can afford to buy and sell up to the point where %98+ of all material is no longer economical to market.

In my lifetime beginning collectors have went from having penny approvals to nickel to dime or more when you can find them. Granddad's collection is of little interest both to today's dealers and the grandkids.

Personally, I spend over thirty years of my half century in this hobby building up a world wide postally used stamp collection I have not bothered adding anything to in the self adhesive era. It contains many more personal memories of times shared with folks at our local stamp club who have closed their albums than interest or economic value to others today.

Thankfully, there is postal history and the challenge to identify contemporary items that will be meaningful to others in future times.

Best regards,

Russ Ryle

Russ ---As I posted earlier the hobby is deflating . Prices are coming down ,to use your example those penny stamps of the 1980's and 1990's that many dealers sold for two cents each had a nice run up with the beginning of ebay to a nickel each . At the height of ebay a nice presentation of worldwide better stamps went as high as you posted to ten cents each if layed out so a person can see what their getting .
Now if you hunt for worldwide stamps for a collection the prices are hard press to get a nickel each . So we come down in price and looks like that prices are falling . I do want to be clear I am not talking about wallpaper like Iron Curtain C-T-O- 's or Sand Dunes ,these are collectible stamps for a worldwide Album .
The auction houses like Rasdale and Kellener are getting very high prices for their bulk collection lots which other posters have said, it is taking any profit margin out of reselling those lots or the margin is too slim to continue .

floortrader, I am not sure I totally follow your comments. You state deflating market yet you state auction houses are getting more for collections. Wo is paying premiums for these collections and then forcing those who break down collections to charge more and why are retail prices dropping?

I would expect more material to enter the market and buy prices to drop (except high end material). The question is how much shows up in resell prices since resell factors in lagging nature and dealer overhead / interest.

I think there is some depression from supply glut as common material comes onto the market and has less of an outlet than in the past (witness the collapse of discount postage prices), but I think more of it is a flattening of the market and the bypassing of middlemen. Collectors have better access to auctions and an outlet to sell unwanted material; they can sell individual items directly on ebay or person to person in ways that they couldn't at a stamp show. Private sellers don't need to mark up to make a living or pay their expenses; they don't have (or want or need) the discipline to set a price and to hold inventory.

Not sure how this fits in to the mix but NY Stamps buys a huge percentage of Rasdales bulk lots and bids aggressively to get them. They must be OK on a small margin or huckstering their own large lots culled from the Rasdale material. Based on the large lots I purchase as a collector I can say that the contents could easily be sold for at least double what I paid if broken down properly. Albums and stockbooks sold as units. Supplies sold separately. Cheaper stamps assembled into logical units. A great deal of work and patience is required. Not everyones cup of tea for sure. Obviously people like NY Stamps are all about volume.

And, sometimes, putting lipstick on pigs.

My impression is that stamp prices have gradually dropped consistently over the past 25 to 30 years. Much of this in my view is attributable to the intensely greater competition introduced by ebay and to a lesser extent other online sales outlets. When I look at specialty dealer pricing or dealers "stuck" in the 1970s mindset of asking 85 to 95% of Scott, it seems laughably archaic and I feel glad those sellers already have a lot of money to live on. Now I realize some things are very hard to find and even harder to find correctly identified, so a specialty dealer (e.g. Gibbons, Holschauer, Schneider, etc) can be a resource for very difficult material at a price if you want the stamp(s) badly enough. But for more mainstream material that doesn't require an educated eye other than to assess the condition/price relationship, there are voluminous opportunities to buy good stamps well below 85% of Scott.

If sellers in the 1980s sold stamps for 2 cents each, they probably did so because it made sense as a percentage of Scott's. I don't know this for sure- I never bought stamps this way. But I do know that except for certain hot areas such as China, KGVI, and East/Southeast Asia (as examples), pressure on pricing is mostly downward IMHO.

There are no universal truths. In certain areas of specialization and certain levels of quality, the trends are up, not down.

This is the second time I have seen you say this recently - where are you getting it from?

EYEONWALL ----It was discussed at the A.P.S. meeting during the November 2013 or 2014 Stamp Show in Chicago . The discussion was about trends in philately ,think Ken Martin was the moderator .

Studebaker Don has mentioned several times about the buckets from which we can draw data. Leadership at the APS has a naturally skewed perspective based on the data sample they see and the comments heard by Floortrader may be pertinent to APS members. Perhaps APS members are gradually becoming more and more specialized and not as much generalized.

But does this mean there are not "hidden" general collectors consuming material in the marketplace, essentially invisible to the APS?

Item 38 of "43 items you should never buy" posted on MSN is very interesting:

38. Collectibles
Dolls. Clown figurines. Silver sets. Commemorative mugs. Itty-bitty clay puppies and kittens. A rack full of ceramic thimbles. Keepsake plates of your favorite golfers.
Dust-catchers, all of them. Budget-busters, too.
How long since you actually noticed your collection of whatever-it-is? Are all these tchotchkes displayed on shelves in rooms where you rarely sit?
Or maybe some of it is packed away in boxes because you've long since run out of room yet still keep buying bear- or penguin-related items. (Or maybe receiving them for your birthday every year because you're too timid to say, "Please stop.")

Rethink what you decide to accumulate. Over time, it's taking up space and costing a bundle. Just because you've collected "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" ephemera since you were a teen doesn't mean you have to keep doing so. If it's neither useful nor pleasing, it's just clutter.

To paraphrase the last sentence, if you find stamp collecting useful or pleasing, enjoy the hobby with those who share your opinion.