Amos, You Infuriate Me

I recently placed a mail order with a dealer advertising in Linn's and he called me up to discuss the order. He mentioned he was about 80 and was *proud* of the fact that he's never used a computer in his life. I suspect this type of person is more common in our hobby than we realize, though these types of people probably won't be around much longer.

Thing is, buyers and sellers both benefit from being online, if for no other reason than that the entire world is at your fingertips. In both buying and selling, I've been doing more business internationally than within the US lately. If I had to rely strictly on print media and shows, I'd be missing out on...well...just about everything.

I buy stamps from 2 sources now:

1. The local stamp store my son works at
2. ebay

And I would say I do 75% of my purchases through ebay these days. Most ebay sellers have reasonable prices and usually include shipping, because they're stamp dealers and have more than enough postage.

The hobby has clearly started to bifurcate with the old rules of the road in decline and the new ways, via the internet, gaining a larger share.

Many of us make the assumption that young people are no longer interested in philately. I believe Studebaker Don has had it right all along- the youth of the hobby have engaged electronically/virtually and likely know very little about the old guard. And the opposite is likely quite true as well- the disciples of traditional philately don't know about the growing group of Neophilatelists.

I'm sure the old guard outnumber the new guard. There just isn't as much demand for postage stamps as there used to be. More and more mail arrives metered or from pre-printed labels that come off of Paypal.

When I was kid, long before I was a stamp collector, I used to love getting the mail to see what cool stamps would be on it. Now, almost nothing comes in the mail these days.

Not for long.

I disagree with this but unfortunately there are not any philatelic statistics to draw upon. However we can make some assumptions based upon overall internet usage metrics (the following are from Statista website).

The internet penetration for the US is now at 95% for all age groups so 95% of the entire US population not only has internet connection but also a device which can use it.

When we break this down by age and assuming that most stamp collectors are in the 50+ year old range, the number of US internet users drops off as seen above but is still north of 50%.

I cannot think of any reason why stamp collectors would deviate from the general population. So I think we can safely say that there are more stamp collectors who have internet access than who do not in the US.
Don