Where Are The Scott Specialty Album 2-Post & 3-Ring Binders & Slipcases?

If someone from Amos can read this post.

1) fix your webpage search engine
2) All countries should be available print on demand. You can have a cutoff date for pages
3) Stock your basic binders and slip cases
4) mounts see above
5) Update Scott catalog to reflect real prices
6) Have cuttoff cate catalogs to say 1980.
7) R and D dennison hinges.

Whoever runs this company needs to reevaluate the business.

When I win the Powerball, I'm going to hire some scientists to figure out the Dennison hinges thing.

My gripe with Scott is their alphabetical order for catalogs and no printed regional catalogs. The digital product is the same price as their printed catalogs. If you collect an area such as French colonies, you may need 3 or more different catalogs to get complete coverage due to all the area renaming.

Luckily, we have other online sources for catalog information.

I am going through an estate and accumulating empty Scott and Minkus binders that need a new home at some point.

My guess is that Amos would need to order some minimum number of binder/slipcase sets from their supplier. At present, they may be unable or unwilling to do so, relying on incoming orders to reach the magic number.

Dale

Dale ---- Think your right ,they only print on-demand , they carry no inventory and none of their retail sellers are carrying a inventory . It sounds like their retail sellers are just add to the list when customer orders are piled up before they start the printing press .

Comes down to the fact even their book binders don't inventory album covers ,a wait for enough buyers before production .

My guess nobody wants to end up holding inventory in a decreasing market .

Floortrader:

That sounds like a self-destructive business plan; make your products unavailable long enough and your customers will decide - or be forced - to buy somewhere else. If holding an inventory of all the items you offer is too large a financial drain (or risk), reduce the number of said items a manageable level.


My father was a very successful divisional sales manager. He had a sign on his office wall to remind himself and his salesmen of one of the basic tenants of sales:

"Samson was a piker; he killed a hundred with the jawbone of an ass. Every day, ten thousand sales are killed with the same weapon."

Albums, pages, and other supplies are readily available from other manufacturers. A small subset of potential customers will make their own pages, but the bulk of collectors prefer to pay someone else to reliably produce them. I was always taught that as hard as it may be to gain a new customer (and their trust), it is magnitudes of order more difficult to regain a lost one.

Subway shop did this. They used to sell 2 versions of their Scott browns/Reproduction series one printed on specialty sized paper and one printed on Scott international size paper. Now you can only get it in international sized paper when I went to look. It's okay to downsize what you sell, but just make a decision and keep stuff in stock. There are too many choices. One thing that is annoying in the stamp community is how many options we have. There is very little standardization when you can just swap one collectors pages into your own collection easily.

There's some good information in this thread but also a fair number of half-truths and a few basic misunderstandings. It reminds me that my main gripe with stamp collecting is stamp collectors. The stamp clubs I used to belong to became toxic dens of old men complaining about everything. Even stamp shows suffer from this problem. I can't tell you the number of times I've spent time sitting at a dealer's table having to listen to the dealer or his customers complain about a long list of tiresome things. I collect partly to relax and partly to get away from my problems. The last thing I want is people grousing about every little irritant in their collecting life – and this thread is a good illustration of that. So let me respond with a few different ways of looking at these "They Don't Do It the Old Way" complaints.

It is true that more and more (maybe "most") suppliers are not carrying large inventories of their products anymore. Might as well get used to it as this has become a standard business policy in more and more companies. Among other reasons, it helps cut down inventory storage costs and related problems like loss or disintegration of merchandise as well as allowing a leaner operation where the supplier only ships when there is enough of a demand and does not necessarily cater to each and every customer immediately.
Yes, the olden days were better, but we live in today, and this is how things are done.

The restaurant model where every customer orders separately, is attended closely by one server, and their meal is delivered separately does not work efficiently or profitably in most other businesses. Car dealerships do not stock every color car nor do they have a vehicle with the exact options you might want. They typically have to order the car for you. Applying an older model of business to today's businesses is just not relevant anymore no matter how nostalgic we get about it. Scott/Amos can get you the products you need – and we should be thankful for that in an era when stamp stores have disappeared and stamp collecting is on the decline. Thank goodness for them despite the delays. What do we do if Scott/Amos goes out of business as Minkus did or as most of the stamp publications have? Remember McKeel's stamp news, Stamp Collector, Western Stamp Collector and others? I used to subscribe to all of them, but all that's left is Linn's and it's a publication that barely qualifies as something to read. That Amos/Scott remains is a very good thing. And Amos Media consists of more than one hobby publication, not just stamps.

As for the tired old claim that something "used to cost" a much lower price, it should be laid to rest. That album that cost "only" $35 in 1970 was a lot of money in 1970. Today, due to inflation, the equivalent of that very same price is $292 (according to an online inflation calculator). That's the real comparison, not using a price 50 years out of date. The VW I bought tin 1970 cost only about $2000 -- so they should still sell for that price today? Scott/Amos selling an album today for $300 is perfectly reasonable – the same price as 50 years ago, not more at all. Why isn't that impressive?

[continued]

The other misleading argument I hear is the repeated claim about Steiner's pages, pages you can print cheaply, prove that stamp albums should be that cheap. Yes you can print online pages cheaply, but the resulting product is not the same as buying a printed album. The resulting pages are typically smaller printer-paper size pages which you three-hole punch and put into a cheap three ring binder. How is that a fair comparison? That album is nowhere near as impressive as a published album. The usual Steiner album next to a Lighthouse or Schaubek or Scott album is not impressive. Using Steiner to prove how cheaply an album can be is misleading since Steiner albums might be described as schoolboy binders with the cheapest possible stamp album pages.

What you can do, and what I do, is to upgrade Steiner's pages. You get a much better result if you photocopy the cheap Schaubek pages onto Scott blank pages. The result looks excellent and the pages can go into Scott binders so they look just as good as Scott albums. However, I should point out that doing that is not "cheap". Scott blank pages cost 50c each plus the cost of photocopying is another 20-25c a page. That makes the resulting "do-it-yourself" Steiner album which looks like a Scott album almost as expensive as Scott's own album. It's only the cheaper-looking smaller Steiner album that is less expensive. Since I want my collections I've worked on so hard to look their best, cheap Steiner pages in a cheap three-ring binder don't work for me. Using Steiner pages as some sort of "proof" that the major album makers are overcharging just does not make sense. Lighthouse, Schaubek, Stanley Gibbons, Yvert, Davo and some other album publishers do charge way too much for my taste -- but compared to them, Scott albums are an amazing bargain. Scott albums cost one-half to one-third the cost of the other albums. Consider this: If I used Lighthouse or Davo albums, my Switzerland albums would cost well over $1000. In Scott albums, it's $455. That's a relative bargain. But sure let's complain about the cost of Scott albums.

As for the Amos/Scott website, yes, they should make their website easier and quicker to use, no doubt about it. It's kind of clunky. But I've used that website dozens and dozens of times, and I've learned where everything is, so I find it perfectly easy to use. It's really not that bad. On the other hand, what do they call those cardboard album spacing strips? Oh, yeah, they call them "filler strips". Some of their terminology makes no sense to me – so I'll complain about that.

[Even more continued]

Yes, Amos/Scott did stop carrying albums for some countries – but that happened decades ago. For pages they don't print anymore, I print Steiner page layouts onto Scott blank pages when I need them, as I've mentioned. It's easy and it looks great, but how often does anyone need to do that? No company is going to carry products almost no one wants to buy. There are dozens of countries Scott has discontinued making pages for because they sell almost none of them. That is not a bad business practice. Your local Ford dealer no longer sells the Pinto, and Chevy no longer sells the Vega. Alert the media!

As for Palo Albums, they are not some iconic example of album perfection. Not only do they use Steiner's page layouts just with a different border and in a different font, which you could print yourself if you wanted to. They also use their own proprietary 4-ring binders so you cannot use any other type of album page or even make your own pages. And their albums are very expensive. Palo's Switzerland album that covers the same years as the sub-$500 Scott album I mentioned above costs $1300! I mean, seriously? Mentioning them as if they've figured out how best to do stamp albums is kind of misleading.

"Vario G" binders (by Lighthouse) seem completely inappropriate for stamp albums. Their tall rectangular rings make turning pages a real chore. They are designed for storage, not viewing a collection of anything. I don't understand why anyone thinks these binders are useful for stamp albums? Don't you want to be able to turn the pages? Lighthouse Grande binders will work as stamp binders, although personally I don't like them very much. I'm not much for the fake "leather" look approach to binders.

But I did love the "complaint" -- if that's what it is -- that in stamp collecting, it's annoying how many options we have. Well, it 's true, isn't it? After all these complaints, that's kind of refreshing -- even if it doesn't actually annoy me.

[Finally! He's done]

DrewM – I will debate you on this. Amos/Scott could take my recommendations and significantly improve their business. They're leaving money on the table and alot of it. ebay and the "used" secondary market are making a premium because of Scott's/Amos's lack of business sense.

1. Fix your website's search engine.
This is not hard to do. Most websites today have decent search functionality—it's an easy fix that mainly involves improving the metadata. How many sales have they lost because customers couldn't find what they were looking for easily?

2. Make all countries available for print-on-demand.
You can have a cutoff date for pages. I'm fine with the print-on-demand model. They don't even have to create new pages and just allow reprints up to the cutoff date. How much money has this company lost because someone wanted the specialty series for Egypt for example. Why can Palo do this but Scott can't. There is not one good reason that I can think off if you use a cutoff date of what you will print. You don't need any labor, just a saved file to your computer.

3. Stock basic binders and slipcases.
They don't have to carry every product, but they should at least stock the main ones. Many people won't buy if they see they'll have to wait weeks. Besides, binders and slipcases don't degrade like paper does. Scott international, Scott specialty should mostly always be in stock.

4. Mounts – see above.

5. Update the Scott catalog to reflect real prices.
To this day, I don't understand why HipStamp, ebay, auction houses, and Scott don't collaborate to establish more realistic pricing. Why buy a new catalog with no changes. I mean really, do they expect if they change the cover of the book every year that will send collectors rushing to buy the same book.

I agree with you on the myth of cheap album pages. We are on the same page here. Scott paper, lighthouse paper and Palo paper are expensive because they are of archival quality and large in size. The experience is different as you point out above and there is a cost to that.

I also agree with you that we are thankful to have Amos/Scott. If they go out business, it would be sad. This is why I bring my points up. I don't think they know how much money they leave on the table. They think there is no demand but there is or I would not see such brisk sales on ebay.

"Yes, Amos/Scott did stop carrying albums for some countries – but that happened decades ago. For pages they don't print anymore, I print Steiner page layouts onto Scott blank pages when I need them, as I've mentioned. It's easy and it looks great, but how often does anyone need to do that? No company is going to carry products almost no one wants to buy. There are dozens of countries Scott has discontinued making pages for because they sell almost none of them. That is not a bad business practice. Your local Ford dealer no longer sells the Pinto, and Chevy no longer sells the Vega. Alert the media!" - But you don't have to carry the product, you just print it on demand with a cutoff date. There is no cost to this with a print onDemand model. Remember Palo already shows you that you can do it. Scott/Amos already has the layouts, so there really is no significant cost to them.

And it is not just ebay, collectors are paying for good condition albums at the auction house. Sometimes, I will literally see nice collection go unsold or have a low bid while the nicer more organized collection sold in nice album sell. Because some collectors take into the account that there is a cost to mount and display stamps.

"There is a cost to mount and display stamps" True .

I just rather put the money into better stamps ,the pages and binders cost money for me but I see good hinges and nice bookcases , with all albums and binders matching as a nice collection to impress other collectors .

floortrader, I will agree with you on the consistent look. There is something to be said of a collection that has all the same look. I was only able to do this on a regional basis (other than the scott international big blues as a side collection) It's all trade-offs.