The Death of Collecting

Saw this on Slate, I'm now worried about the 10 long boxes of comics I've got stowed in the kid's room.

Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They've taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn't get out of the game took a beating.

Hate to break it to you, Eezy, but the comic book crash of the late nineties likely wiped out the value of a lot of the stuff from that time period.

Wait. What about all my beanie babies? They're still worth thousands, right?

Yeah, the comics are likely worth less than you paid for them.

I know because I looked up values on a lot of the more potentially valuable ones I had fairly recently. I was planning on getting rid of the whole lot of them, but I think my findings were that I might be able to sell the whole collection for a little less than half of what I originally paid for them.

I was unhappy.

I've had similar findings on my comic collection. What at one time might have been $35 - 40K is now maybe worth $10K. And that's if I can get someone to buy them.

The problem with the inflated values of the early 90s is the prices were purely speculative. And since so many people were speculating, everyone was buying comics (most people didn't even read them, they just bagged and boarded them as "investments") and because of the surge, Marvel and DC started making millions of prints. Why would something that had one MILLION copies (even if it was, say, Death of Superman) be worth anything? Then the comic houses inflated their budgets (because HEY, we're producing ONE MILLION copies of our most popular books) and, yep, crash.

It does kind of suck though. I spend between $10 and $20 a week on comics, and I keep them out of habit, but I know it's not like they're going to all of a sudden be worth something. Half time time a comic will sit on the floor for a week and get wrinkled or torn and it's just like "Oh well."

The reason many card shops are gone is really because of ebay.

Meh, I will keep my collection till about retirement age. Perhaps by then my comics will be worth something again. You never know, the market is fairly fickle.

I think many of the smaller "Mom & Pop" stores catering to hobbies are in serious trouble and likely will be gone in the next ten years. I know of 5 sport card shop closings in the past 5 years as well as several hobbyist stores (comics, D&D, MTG, preplayed video games, sports memorabilia, models/railroads/racing etc) shutting down as well. There's just too much competition from "Big Business" entities like Walmart/Michaels/Gamestop stores and online businesses such as eBay and Amazon.

I always loved going into smaller stores and finding neat items or collectibles but the way things are going its just going to be reduced to clicking a "Submit" button on a website.

People are just collecting epic items now. I'm no academic, but I predict that the number of ebay auctions for fake objects in video games has gone up, counter-balancing the drop in real life collecting. It's all bits now, baby.

But Boba Fett action figures will always be cool to collect.

Shut up.

Most of the surviving comics and bb card shops are now skating by on:

Pokemeon, Yu Gi Oh, and magic

Theyve become more gaming centers with regular warhammer and other tabletop game tournaments.

I could care less as Im nowhere near the mood to sell. Im sure I have $15k+ worth of anime action figures and models. They are priceless to me.

Tell you what else is killing collecting, digital distribution. I used to buy between 5 and 8 videogames a month. My monetary situation hasn't changed, if anything it improved, but instead of buying all of those games at retail, I'm downloading from Steam or Live Arcade or just getting stuff from Direc2Drive or Gamefly even.

Managed to sell about $1100 worth of videogames earlier this season and darn glad I did too. Especially when you see lots on Ebay averaging about $1-3 a game.

The pleasure of collecting is supposed to come from possession, isn't it? Anyone who bought baseball cards as an investment wasn't coming at it from the right angle. Someone like Gollum had the soul of a collector. You ever see him worrying about how much the ring would fetch on E-bay? No way. It was all about the precious, baby.

This reminds me of that Amazing Stories episode...

Baseball cards are worthless, yeah, but surely my Garbage Pail Kids collection is worth a bundle by now. Right? Right?!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

. . . surely my Garbage Pail Kids collection is worth a bundle by now. Right? Right?!

If only people would buy all the stuff I've pulled out of my nose. I've got this huge collection stored up underneath tables all over my house.

Funkenpants wrote:

Someone like Gollum had the soul of a collector. You ever see him worrying about how much the ring would fetch on E-bay? No way. It was all about the precious, baby.

That brightened my day, man. Thanks.

One word: Pogs.

Desram wrote:

One word: Pogs.

Stickers

Speaking as an ex-comic book/gaming store owner, I can tell you that you don't want anything to do with that business. The margins for new stuff are mediocre at best and you can't return overstock like a book store can. Yeah, B&N can return comics, but the specialty store that got the comics going can not. Ooookay.

Online sales are killing the local stores too, but that's likely true of any business. Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast says you can't have more than 50% of your sales come from online sales of their product, but I don't see how they can enforce that.

I think I'll stop before I lose the ability to speak coherently (assuming I ever could), but I will say in closing I felt fairly fortunate to have only lost several 10's of thousands of dollars in the process.

One word: Pogs.

When people say "Pogs", I think Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire

Karmajay - what is that your avatar is licking?

Probably some car part or something. But to me it's looks like a tiny novelty pump.

Wounder wrote:

Online sales are killing the local stores too, but that's likely true of any business. Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast says you can't have more than 50% of your sales come from online sales of their product, but I don't see how they can enforce that.

That's an interesting "policy" when the company is providing a persistent, digital equivalent of the game. Do people even buy the real cards these days?

I have to say, I have mixed feelings about this. So much so that I feel an article coming on.

What about the Collecting of Death? A while back I had a co-worker that bragged over lunch (a lunch with a lot of people, including the nice old librarians) that one year he killed just about every songbird in his neighborhood. He was laughing about how quiet it was that year. And as if that wasn't bad enough, he said he "took their leg as a trophy."

Last I heard, he's at a naval officer academy.

Last I heard, he's at a naval officer academy.

As a citizen of a coastal state, I think I'll get to building that bunker now.