Who is the biggest culprit?

[Leon]

Great conversations and everyone makes good points.

Just as a point of reference, I collected as a kid in the late 1960s. I wasn't passionate it was just something to do with my friends, sort of like riding bicycles. Then, when I was around 33-34 yrs old I got hooked on vintage cards and have loved it since then. Maybe we are looking at it mostly the wrong way. Maybe the kids aren't the absolute answer for longevity of the hobby but more the 20 somethings through 30 somethings that get back into it, along with the old timers like Dan McKee, who never stopped doing it from when they were young tykes and are now in their later 40s. Maybe it has changed from mostly a hobby for kids to a hobby for adults? That is certainly the case for the pre-war stuff. No doubt due to the cost of some of the cards. Great thread and not one major argument.............yet .

[Rich Klein]

Couple of things:

I think I have written about this in one of my hobby columns but as a reminder, when I used to go to my favorite card shop in the 1980's (H&H Hobbiies in Garfield, NJ) the kids and yes there were plenty of those then at the store, would buy the 1985 Topps packs and if Mattingly, Gooden, Big Mac, Eric Davis, Clemens, Puckett, etc did not come out then the rest of the cards were left on the counter.

Think of Mattingly as today's "insert" card and yes some things adapt but do not change.

This is a segmented hobby and yes for the most part the only thing most collectors care about are the "hits". Even my wife when we open boxes for the hobby column I write only cares about autographs and relic cards that she pulls. We opened an 1982 Donruss box for my b-day and she was bored in five packs. Of course, I got 5 Ripken Jr RC's out of that box so I enjoyed the rest of the box

As for kids, the barrier for entry to attend events is high. Back in the day the average show was $1-2 with shops in every town. My friend had one of the seven stores in Minot ND during the real hobby peak time.

This board, because of the vintage nature, does skew much older than FCB. At the national i was talking to a fellow dual board member and there is very little crossover between posters. The FCB posters skew younger, probably by at least a decade.

[bn2cardz]

There are many great points. I just wanted to add to the kid collecting aspect of the conversation.

I am 29 years old so when I was collecting as a child it was already a business. Destroying cards was popular prior to the 80s amongst children but i was still living in the past as a child doing it in the early 90s. Non like the older generations before me though I did have the option to go to card shops. I used price guides as a way to know what level I could expect to trade cards, not to buy them or sell them.

If we want to grow the hobby to the children we need to remember that the way they go about things can be a lot more simple than adults go about it. So the adults that do it as a hobby need to be on their level when dealing with them and treat them fairly.

There was a card shop that as a child I HATED going to. They always made me feel like I was inconveniencing them when I would ask them questions. Sometimes I would go in and see a ripken card that I wanted for my Ripken collection. I would offer to trade with them and they wouldn't even look at my cards. Living in St. Louis they were never going to be selling Ripken at a high value and I was willing to trade them dollar for dollar anything else I had (including Cardinals cards that are a hot commodity here). To this day when I see them at shows I don't even stop at their table. My wife even knows who they are and knows my disdain for how they treated children in the hobby as being a waste of time.

On the other hand there were many great collectors who helped me and taught me many things. Some shop owners were open to trading with me on my sub $10 cards to help out my collecting. I am sure there were times that looking at my cards was a waste of time and they knew it, but they still would do it anyways. These are the guys that are now getting my business as an adult with a steady income.

[WWGjohn]

I see five main factors contributing to the decline in collecting interest.

1) The proliferation of price guides which led to increased emphasis on collecting for monetary value.

2) The explosion of card sets beginning in the 80's and the emergence of "premium" cards that killed a lot of collector interest.

3) The emergence of TPG which magnified even more, the emphasis on collecting for monetary value. They created artificial/imaginary guidelines for determining value, that bore almost no resemblance to grading standards that had been in existence for decades prior to their emergence.

4) The rise of the internet and the demise of the local card shop. Availability of cards by auction on Ebay and later, other sources led to the gradual disappearance of the card shop. With that went the opportunity for people/kids to be introduced to cards, first hand, to get knowledge of the hobby and see a variety of cards in person, and learn from people concerned with the hobby aspect of collecting.

5) The rise of the internet, electronic gadgets, and social media that offer people/kids many more entertainment options besides traditional hobbies, and require less thoughtful engagement.

None of these factors by themselves is responsible for the drop in collecting interest, but combined, they have created an atmosphere that is not conducive to developing a reflective hobby interest where the focus is on the intrinsic value of the collectible as opposed to the monetary value. Our attention span is truly shrinking.