The Junk Wax Era- when did it start?

[HasselhoffsCheeseburger]

I stumbled across some interesting information a while back while researching a particular Donruss product.

Topps sales went from ~500 million cards/year in the late-1970s to ~1 billion by the mid-1980s (that's sales, not production. Obviously production was much higher).

Donruss saw production increases each year in the early-1980s, and 100% increases in BOTH 1986 and 1987 (twice as much in 1986 than 1985, and twice as much in 1987 than in 1986).

In 1987, Topps had a 50% market share, Donruss ~25%, and Fleer a little less than 25%.

While these aren't firm production numbers, I don't think it's unreasonable to use them to extrapolate a ballpark set of parameters. Obviously, you're looking at major production increases for Topps even when comparing late-70s to early-80s, with gargantuan increases starting in 1986. But more importantly, this is important information for the people that seem to think that they'll see future price increases with 1980s that we're seeing with 1970s currently. There's just too much disparity in the amount of product produced to draw any kind of correlations.

But, and this is just my opinion, if you're purchasing cards solely for an investment, you're almost always going to be disappointed. The people I know that have done well did so because they collected what they enjoyed and then chose to get out when a trend caught fire. Since I've started collecting unopened the most excited I've got over an acquisition and the items that bring me the most joy having them in my collection aren't the 1970s items, they've been the hard-to-find stuff from the "junk wax era." Because that's when collecting was the most fun for me as a kid.