The Shrinking World of the Stamp Collector (2012)
themidtowngazette.comA question for anyone who does collecting of stamps/coins/baseball cards, etc.: How do you deal with / feel about the trend of the creators of the collected items making things specifically to be collected?
A while back I picked up a few cheap pre-WW1 German coins -- fun to have a bit of history for not that much money. I haven't pursued coin collecting because I could imagine going down a rabbit hole of spending way too much money on it. But when I see, say, the US Mint releasing special commemorative coins specifically for collectors, my whole interest in the field dries up. It takes a hobby that, in my opinion, would be about discovery and the individual search for something and turns it into merely another consumer product to consume. Same with so many stamps nowadays, being designed and released specifically for collectors to gobble up. And then there's baseball cards and Magic cards and "colllector's editions" of video game boxes that are all designed as these mass-market products that satisfy the collecting urge in a cynical way.
If I did end up really getting into collecting, I'd think it would be more enjoyable to collect interesting rocks found during travel, or historical items like coins/stamps that were all made before the trend of marketing to collectors.
I am not a collector myself, but my grandfather was a "stamp collector". I heard all through my childhood about the stamps he had collected since the 1950's, how big and presumably valuable his collection was. He passed almost 20 years ago, and when we finally went through his (admittedly large) collection about 5 years ago, we discovered that everything he collected was the type of stamp you describe - made to be "collectible", not actually particularly interesting or rare. Essentially worthless in terms of monetary value.
However, he enjoyed his lifelong hobby, so, who can say?
The funny thing is that I buy unused stamps off EBay. Some recent deals I got were for about 43 cents on the dollar. But usually they go for 50-60% of face.
Been doing this for the last 15 years with no real change in pricing (which really means a loss every year).
Mostly 30-50 cent stamps (this is Canada). But ranging from 8c to $2.5
I use the smaller ones on regular envelopes. Usually I have some $1 or $2 stamps to make up any balance on packages (or just buy it from the post office).
It’s quite a bit of extra profit when I sell stuff.
Though my packages probably look a little... Unabombery.
I’m sure the receivers get a little laugh when their package arrives covered in stamps.
> I’m sure the receivers get a little laugh when their package arrives covered in stamps.
Reminds me of a parcel I got from Japan (in the UK). The front was about A4-sized, and entirely covered in stamps (with a small gap for the address).
haha, I do the exact same thing but only for buying first class stamps.
In the UK, this is generally fraudulent – the stamps aren't really unused, they just weren't franked properly, or had the ink removed somehow.
Those are available, but the ones I buy are still lick and stick. Sometimes still with the commemorative stuff around the perforations.
I think this is where the confusion comes from. lick and stick haven't been generally available to regular buyers for some years now (i.e. go to a store that sells stamps and you get a book of 6 or 12) and the available ones are generally self adhesive. Great fun when my toddler finds a fresh book of "stickers" to stick all over the house... The situation is different with sheets of stamps that the post office has but most of the time they just print a generic postage label with the exact denomination required so it's rare to get issued as a punter a lick and stick. as a result any "unused" UK stamps on ebay are ones that have been successfully lifted from unfranked letters (yes it's possible, despite the tear-holes cut into them)
It's an excellent time to collect super rare stamps. Common stamps declined in value and a lot of abandoned collections are sold for next to nothing so it's easier than ever to look for some hidden gems. In 10-20 years, when all the random collections disappear it'll be a super specialized market with high prices again based on scarcity. Some years ago when I was into cars, I could buy any beaten up BMWs for less than €1000 including E24 6-series or E9. Sometimes I'd find a gem in super an excellent condition, and it still followed price trend with an abundance of similar cars for sale. Now with all these cars junked to buy a parts E24 you need to have upwards of €7000.
Not sure about that: When the next generation doesn't know what a stamp is, and the fascination, getting a message from someone, getting glimpse into the world, has no basis, who will 'collect'?
I think it's similar to collecting old guitars; people in their financial prime buy a connection to the music and bands of the 60ies and 70ies; their children may have grown up with electronic music and can't relate.
Cars might be relatable, since you can still drive around with it, but the current fashion of having 'vintage' things may be over in 10 years.
People can relate to all kinds of things that were no longer in use when they were born. Many times that foreignness can even make it more attractive, compared to someone for whom stamps were just an ordinary tool.
More like vinyl collections: it becomes valuable only after it goes through a period of being untrendy enough that a lot of the stock gets thrown away.
...before it finally fizzles out, along with the Hipsters that brought it back in the first place!?
You just wrote off entire business of trading antiques.
There's a well-recognized trend in car collecting: the value follows the age of people who can afford what they dreamed about in high school.
Following this trend, Model As and Ts have gone way down, as the dreamers are now past the age or dead.
57 Chevys are on the downside, too. Too old.
90s Japanese sports cars are on the upswing now.
But stamps? I don't see it recovering. It was popular in the 70s/80s, like Professional Bowling. Both are still with us, but not the same as they were.
The other thing about 90s Japanese cars is that cars, once old enough, can be easily imported regardless of emissions/safety standards.
In Canada, I think it’s 17 years of age, then you can bring in your right hand drive car more easily than container of potatoes.
Personally, I don’t know why each country has its own safety standards when every industrialized country has a similar enough mix of speed limits and urban/suburban/rural environments.
A light HN story... Stamp collecting (or was it the Kool-Aid stand) might've been my first "startup", in early grade school. I casually collected stamps myself, and would get duplicates of interesting-looking ones. So I turned my duplicates into stamp collecting starter kits and supplements, packaged in glassine envelopes with handwritten labels and prices, packed them into my little kid's blue suitcase (traveling salesman's case), and brought them to school, to sell to other kids. I don't recall whether I got any sales.
Another stamps-related early sign of disturbing startup inclinations was when, in early grade school, the class would occasionally be put to work, for a fund-raiser, trimming out stamps from boxes of envelopes. I suppose the trimmed parts were going to a company, to soak off, press, and sell. Well, I don't know how I'd even heard this was a thing, but I also trimmed out the addresses from the envelopes, then presented a pile of them to one of the mothers helping out in class, saying we could use them to assemble and sell a mailing list. I might only recall that because one of the mothers told my mom, probably in a "you'll never guess what your child said this time" way, and I guess it was a mix of funny and embarrassing to my mom.
(After that, there were several non-stamp-related, more-credible childhood "startups", until I lucked into a hardcore software engineering job. They used to say that stamp collecting was a great way to get children started learning history, but it got me started learning business.)
Great story.
Do you think you'll give up programming for a more sales-oriented gig one day?
Thanks. I'm absolutely not a salesperson, nor any kind of CEO material. After I outgrew my childhood innocence sales boldness, I'm clearly better-suited to be a startup technical co-founder/contributor (maybe also providing a bit of not-totally-naive business sounding board to the startup CEO), developer, researcher, and maybe also startup dev leading.
Same deal with baseball cards (and all sports cards), they had enormous print runs but then the collectors went away so now everybody who wants a Don Mattingly rookie card already has 7.
After finding them completely unsaleable I ended up giving my collection to a family friend who still just enjoys the cards.
hahaha, this is so funny because I was cleaning out my closet and noticed the same thing. Even though the cards were 20-30 years old...they were basically worthless. I live in a high cost of living area so to me there is no point keeping them around taking up space. I must've tossed well over 10,000 cards into the trash.
Moral of the story: teach your kids how to invest in the stock market instead of them "investing" their money into collectibles. Teach your kids the value of investing early and encourage them to do it. They can still buy collectible toys but make sure to remind them that they won't be worth much in the future and to encourage them to buy stocks if they want to invest their money for the future.
Invest in a collection because you like the collection. If you love baseball cards, the fact that a few years ago you paid $100 for a card that you could get for $1 today doesn't matter because you had that card to enjoy for those few years. Note that love is different from fad. If you just buy the card because everybody else is, with no enjoyment, then it is a loss.
My life is better for having a few collectibles around now. I could have instead invested the money spent, and it would have already doubled, and it would double a few more times before I die - since I don't enjoy collecting money in my bank account it would be a waste.
Don't get me wrong: I to enjoy financial security. I can't retire today (well I could, but I couldn't afford to live the life I want), but the money I'm setting aside for retirement is planned to be used to enjoy life when I retire.
Sometimes I watch Antiques Roadshow and Strange Inheritance. The big scores people make still rarely justify their investment - investing in land or the stock market paid much better, and much more reliably.
I've got a decent coin collection going, and a few legitimately noteworthy pieces like ancient coinage and what I call my conflict diamonds (South Vietnam, Japanese occupation currency, Somali coins, etc.), but I think it's ending up a lot like stamps. Except for the very high end museum quality collections, little of most personal collections is worth very much (except in currency its face or bullion value), and I do it purely for the historicity of the artifacts.
Vinyls, film cameras, typewriters, camper vans, and other objects which have been superseded by the ever turning wheels of progress have known notable regains of interest lately.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Urban Outfitters started selling vintage stamp collections.
The difference between all those and stamps is that the former offers an experience. UO sells a lifestyle, and objects like stamps don't convey a particularly exciting narrative within that.
Not only that they provide an experience, they are also subject to wear and tear while doing so. The supply in historic stamps is a lot more stable than the supply in historic mechanical things that some may actually want to use.
Cameras may be obsolete, but old camera lenses can be adapted to modern mirrorless cameras pretty easily, and usually they last more than camera bodies. There are some 70s/80s ones that are pretty decent even for modern standards, plus they have a look that modern lenses don't have.. so prices are rising..
Camper vans are on the rise.
And have been for almost a decade now.
A couple of months ago I was cleaning out a closet and I found my old stamp collection from when I was a kid. It was fun to look through and see so many stamps from nations that no longer exist.
I looked on some auction sites, and it seems like you can buy the collections of the recently deceased at pretty cheap prices. I don't know if they're worth the money, but if you're just collecting for fun, and not for profit, it seems like a good way to beef up your collection.
A local coin/stamp person was completely uninterested in my old stamps from like 35 years ago. I think the shrinking number of collectors is outstripping the number of collections getting thrown out, and the whole idea of collecting stamps is just fading away.
Yup it is exactly that. The big problem, in contrast with precious metals, is that stamps have basically no intrinsic value. They're just pieces of paper. At least with precious metals, the coins can be melted down to create high technology.
Cryptocurrency will take its place :) Millennials will flock to alt coins just as the old people went into stamps
Stamps from after WW2 never had any value.
This story is 6.5 years old. Wonder how that store is doing now
Still in business apparently. They seem to sell themselves as NYC's only stamp store. Based on the yelp reviews...it appears their biggest customers are women looking to buy vintage stamps for wedding invitations lol