Proposed Merger Of The APS And Asda

Focusing on one seller who is in his 90's probably just diverts attention away from the main issue which is a general lack of modernity in philatelic sales. We can get wrapped around the axle arguing whether or not A&D has a great web presence to which the answer is obviously a big NO. The concern is that many sellers are neglecting a demographic of younger collectors that are inarguably the future of the hobby by living in the past when it comes to their means and methods of peddling their wares.

So where are we when the legacy sellers fade out by attrition? That is the question. Are they replaced by tech savvy sellers that embrace technology? Age does not have to be the deciding factor. Old people can code too.

I think that the traditional customer service has been somewhat replaced by communities like this one. Sellers, even if they do not have their own online resources, can join a community like this and offer assistance, get feedback, and support those online-enabled customers. Ditto for other two-way communication technologies like Zoom or TeamViewer.

A seller does not have to have a lot of money or be a techie to setup a Zoom or desktop sharing application. They then could simply include contact instructions on packing slips, invoices or in their listings on how customers can get one-on-one support. But I am thinking that some sellers see no need to invest in long-term customer relationships. They are fine with making 100 sales to 100 different buyers. It is fairly well understood that some folks do not think in terms of long-term and have more of a 'real-time' perspective.

For me, the question is, 'is this approach good or bad for the hobby in general'. As we have seen in this community, supporting others takes a lot of patience and selflessness. 'Burn out' can be common for those that help; some think to themselves 'why should I be doing the support that sellers really should be doing?'.

Perhaps THIS is what an organization like ASDA should be doing, helping teach and offer support for sellers who want to build a good online customer base.
Don

Don makes an excellent point about building relationships. The two best people that I have dealt with over the years when it comes to communication are Ed Reiser of Century Stamps and Christopher Rupp. They not only offer their knowledge freely they are also proactive when it comes to keeping in touch even when it is on a personal level (no stamps involved). Of the two only Ed maintains a website and it is fairly well done but has no real-time inventory or search function. You also have to click on broad Scott number categories, scroll to find a number you are interested in and click on a link for a photo. Both offer mostly pricier goods with Christopher being more Siegel level.

My issue is mostly with sellers that deal in bread-and-butter, lower cv stamps. Many make it difficult or almost impossible to find what you want. There is no inventory and may be a list that does not ensure that they actually have the item and what the item looks like. Emails may take days or more to be answered and sometimes there is no reply. It may be a business model that works for them using the shotgun sales approach of 100 sales to 100 customers, but they cannot quantify or do not realize how many more customers just moved on to another seller (likely ebay or Hip).

You can never beat a relationship with a seller especially when there is a problem, or you are unsure of something. Christopher has actually talked me OUT of buying something.

I realize that you cannot mandate coming into the digital age but maybe being able to demonstrate the financial gains to be made by doing so would move things along a bit. How to do that though. I can't really say that I know of many "young" dealers that I have found. Charles Epting comes to mind, but he is an auction house representative and I guess that does not really count.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges in philatelic sales is inventory management. Thousands of items that are in the main low retail value that could use a description and a photo and inventory updates. Probably not reasonable to expect much in the way of detail the more I think about it.

You mean like you? He has been extremely successful operating how he does and does not need to change even if you want him to. And now with the passing of his wife he is winding down and isn't going to jump on the internet.

This onion has many layers.

The old-line traditional dealers that fill up a van and go to 10-15 shows a year are all over 60 years of age, in my neck of the woods. They travel across 1 or 2 states, tops. I wonder if they'll be replaced? I've been to several small and medium shows since the pandemic, and I'd guess that the youngest dealer I saw was 50-ish, and I'm being optimistic in my assessment. The rest appeared to be north of 65.

Will the 30-year-old dealers that have an internet presence decide at some point to fill up a van and drive to Omaha or Fayetteville to pay for two nights in a hotel, eat cold, crappy food, and (maybe) sell stamps? I'm skeptical. If you haven't been set up for that, I don't think you can do it on a whim. To say nothing of wanting to.

I haven't been to a Chicagopex-size show since the pandemic, so my data are dated. I believe there might be some number of people who will still be willing to fill a trailer and drive to the big shows for the foreseeable future, but I have to believe it is a shrinking number?

All of these dealers can think about how they use the internet to survive as a dealer, if they want to. What I wonder is whether the bourse can survive, as a concept. In ten or fifteen years will there be new people willing to pack up their minivans every month for a second-Sunday bourse? You have to believe that many of the dealers doing it today will be gone in ten or fifteen years.

I think the small shows are in real trouble with the aging dealer population. (In my neck of the woods, the annual show is a not-insignificant revenue enhancer for the local clubs.)

I look at the MSDA (Midwest) as a subset of the ASDA, and the demographics ain't great. (No offense if you're an MSDA member who is young and ruggedly handsome, and routinely mistaken for Jimmy Stewart...perhaps we haven't met.)

GASS show costs (simplified)

Show hotel: $139/night
Dealer - $1150/$1650/misc booths range down to $325
Exhibitors - $20/frame (max $200)
Society booths - $0
General admission- $0

I would recommend reducing dealer fees. exhibitors paying a lot more. societies pay at least the info booth price (now $500). attendees pay a minimum charge. The admission price would be like 2x the price set as cup of coffee (!) at show canteen.

I also think the seminars need to be better planned as well to offer broader appeal. For example a society table may be waived if they have some seminar (more than a meet and greet).

Perhaps this thread should not run off on this tangent, but.... show finances are often complicated.

At many large convention centers, if admission is charged, the registration booth then must be manned by paid convention center personnel. The sponsor loses money to charge admission due to the cost of collection labor!

Many large convention centers are also linked to their local hotels, so that a contract for the convention center includes a room-night guarantee with the hotels.

Societies: Many years ago, many of the major societies rotated their annual meetings among the WSP shows. More recently they have shifted to have the meetings as STAMPSHOW/GASS. This leaves the WSP shows hurting for visiting societies and their accompanying exhibits. I have suggested (to no avail), that societies be charged a modest meeting/booth charge to have their annual meeting at STAMPSHOW/GASS, but at a reduced charge if they had a significant regional meeting at one of the WSP shows in the year before. (I hesitate to suggest numbers, but let's say $200/$100 as an example.)

I am amazed at how many collectors have no problem spending $500+ at a show but simultaneously complain loudly if they had to pay for parking or admission. Happens all the time.

Angore, what seminar are you volunteering to present?

"societies pay at least the info booth price (now $500)"

One if the societies I belong to would most certainly drop out for $500 and the officers that man he booth would stop attending the show (unless it happened to be near where they live) resulting in lower attendance and lower dealer revenue. $50 might fly.

"At many large convention centers, if admission is charged, the registration booth then must be manned by paid convention center personnel. The sponsor loses money to charge admission due to the cost of collection labor!"

True. But there may be some places where we would not have to use their labor. But there are some foolish collector who refuse to pay $5 to get into a show that they would spend $500 at, so it is hard to guess what the net result would be.

"I also think the seminars need to be better planned as well to offer broader appeal." The APS does not plan seminars." It has to rely on what people are willing to present.

A few random thoughts -

"At many large convention centers, if admission is charged, the registration booth then must be manned by paid convention center personnel. The sponsor loses money to charge admission due to the cost of collection labor!"

So, if convention labor does indeed need to be employed, because the local union/politicians/whoever has a stranglehold on the convention center rules, groups that would have continued to rent the facility by charging a decent admission price might drop out over time because the finances don't make sense. So, instead of just negotiating for a small percentage of the take as additional rent, the facility stays empty for longer, local hotels/businesses/restaurants have less income, and the group either goes elsewhere or continues to wither. Another "win/win (?) for the local unions/politicians/whomever.

Also, I've never understood the antipathy on the part of stamp collectors to paying a decent admission fee. Echoing comment above, you're paying for airfare/gas, hotel, meals, dropping $500 on stamps, but you balk at paying a fee of $25/35/pick a number to help the show survive?

As an aside, I have the same reaction w/r to the annual fee that the APS charges, which frankly is a pittance at this point IMO, and I'm not rich. If you don't find value, then fine - don't join. If you find value in what they do for you, why the heck wouldn't you support an increase in the fee if that helps keep it going? How does a $10 increase in the fee all of a sudden make the APS not worth it?

In general, I'm just trying to understand why a certain cohort of collectors appears to be cheap (for lack of a more polite word) with regard to a hobby they claim to love, when they wouldn't think twice about dropping the same amount of money on some trivial ephemeral like a couple of cups of coffee.

Sorry for a bit of a sidetracking rant, but the survival of the APS and stamp shows is an issue here.

As convention chair of 3 national non stamp conventions I have never had to higher hotel staff to take admission money. Yes I have had to use their food and beverage, security, decorator (some times) but never both staff.

Free booths are a trade. If I give a free booth to a local association they give us a free booth at their local show or promote the show to their members or if it is like a forum they promote it.

My wife used to do some trade shows (non-philatelic) in Chicago, Boston and NY. She was not allowed to move her booth materials or anything for that matter into the facility. The line was the loading dock. After that she had to pay union labor to move everything in and it was the most expensive part of the entire endeavor.

I'm not focusing on anyone. I have very specifically said "THIS IS AN EXAMPLE!" Everyone else is focusing on A&D. We can pick other companies that are doing the same thing. Apparently, people don't understand what examples are.

I've done a ton of trade shows in my life (also non-philatelic) and virtually all of them, especially in a convention center, you can't do anything for yourself. It's a union shop and they have to do everything. I've seen some where you literally cannot plug anything into an outlet without a union electrician watching you do it. I don't know if that's the case in smaller venues, certainly, just sticking a couple of tables into a hotel ballroom shouldn't be bad, but for the big shows, I have no idea how anyone manages.

Was not singling you out. Chill brother.

A lot going on in this overall thread. At 53, I might be one of those 'younger folks' or 'next generation.' I'm fully vested in my retirement so I don't have that to worry about and I have enough cash that I feel I can "do it right".

In the early to mid-1990s, I worked part-time for a fairly busy stamp dealer. I helped at the occasional show and during busy periods, would help with mail order work. This was pre-Internet days, so no Internet sales. I remember her saying once that she tried to buy material at 10-15 percent of Scott and sell it at 75-80% of Scott. And that most of her stock came from the purchase of collections.

This creates a situation when planning a business where any kind of revenue projections are difficult. I THINK you can get fairly accurate on expenses. I'm just not sure how to create even broad expectations for revenue.

A friend owns a brick-and-mortar store. He sells games (board games, D&D, etc.) and other related hobby merchandise. Merchandise is different - it is sourced from wholesalers and distributors. There are various discounts for retailers buying from these sources, and in some cases, there is MSRP set up. When he started his business about 10 years ago, data was available. There was market data, some ideas of how to project sales in the early years, This is what the trade organization for the industry he's in was able to provide. He can accurately track sales, track turns on inventory, and using real data, make decisions about what to cut and what to carry more of.

Stamps, not so much. When talking to him about my thoughts about diving into stamp dealing, he said the notion of inventory was scary to him. He used Penny Black as an example. Given variables in condition, plate, etc., how many SKUs might you have? He's right. It's daunting. When he went to a show with me and I remember he was just kind of stunned at how many purchases I made in which the dealer made no notation or record of the purchase.

My point is that stamp collecting can be a tremendously complex business. And a lot of it seems to be run on instinct and sort of a "feel" for your business and what your customers want/like. Not saying it is wrong, There's not a lot of hard data out there to help a prospective dealer make some determinations as to the level of risk of his or her investment.

ASDA does not seem to be a trade association in the traditional sense. They "feel" much more like a promotional group. When I worked in public relations, one of the clients I worked on was the Washington Apple Commission, which was a consortium of apple growers in Washington that banded together to promote Washington Apples. A consortium of stamp dealers to promote the hobby is not a bad thing, but what one would think would be a source of some real industry data isn't.

I don't know. I'm babbling at this point, but this is what came to mind when there were mentions of who is going to take over for the traditional dealers. I have a lot more thoughts in this direction, but yea.