I’ve come to a conclusion of late. It just isn’t fun collecting anymore. It isn’t just one thing, it’s everything. It’s completely lost it’s luster and that has nothing to do with what’s being collected.

The collecting world has just gone to hell.My wife and I were talking about this as we left yet another store that had absolutely nothing we wanted to buy. They rarely ever do these days. It seems that if you want to collect anything, you have to do so online and there’s no fun in that, at least for me.

See, I used to, many years ago now, run around to a dozen or more stores a couple of times a week, just so I could see what new things were out on the shelves. I had a particular route on my way home from work, back when I was collecting action figures, and I’d go into numerous Walmarts, Targets, Toys-r-Us’ and other stores, just to see what they had. There was almost always something there, something I hadn’t seen, something that I’d just come across and had to buy.

It was the thrill of the hunt that made it worthwhile. It was the reason I was collecting in the first place.

All of that is gone today.

Now, collecting of all kinds is done through websites. You log on, you pick out what you want, hoping to get past all of the bots that are out trying to get the good stuff so they can screw over the regular consumers, and enter your credit card number. Collecting today is a credit card exercise.

I don’t find that fun at all. I want to find it for myself. I want to hold it in my own hands. I want the sense of accomplishment for finding it. All of that is gone today.

I’ve been a collector of a lot of different things in my life. I started collecting stamps when I was very young. I’d soak them off of mail that came to the house and later, constantly visit local stamp shops and go to local stamp shows looking for new things to add to my collection. All of that is gone today.  There are no more stamp dealers around to go to, certainly not in my neck of the woods. There are one or two I could conceivably drive to, but I know those, they are just coin and precious metal dealers with a rack of cheap stamps for kids. There’s no point to trying, even before COVID.

As I said, I collected action figures, until it stopped being fun with the coming of the online-only shopping experience and it was made worse by the flippers who would make back-room deals with all of the retailers so that anything good that came out, it never hit the store shelves. They’d walk out of the store with a cart-full of manufacturer boxes and that would be the end of that. The employees would get paid off and these things would show up at local toy shows at absurdly inflated prices. Why? Because no one else could ever get them!

That was right around the time that Walmart drove all of the specialty toy retailers out of business, then reduced their own toy aisles to a bare minimum. There just wasn’t anywhere to go to get the figures, thus I gave up and stopped collecting.

Then came Funko, which for a while was fun, but now we have the same problem. Stores stocked them by the hundreds… for a while. Now, at least where I am, it will go months without a single new thing going on the shelf. They don’t care anymore. That leaves having to go online, but even there, the flippers rule and bots clear out all of the worthwhile Pops before anyone else has a chance. These things go out of stock in mere seconds. It’s not that Funko and other retailers couldn’t fix the problem, very easily in fact, it’s that they don’t  care. So long as they get their sales, what difference does it make? The secondary market is completely out of control.

Plus, Funko is no longer making things I have any interest in. They’ve hit all of the 80s nostalgia, now they’re going after stuff made in the 2000s and I just don’t care. The number of Pops I’ve bought this year is minimal at best, even with doing it online. It’s just not fun anymore.

So my question is, what next? Because I can’t see a single thing I’d care about collecting that doesn’t have the same problems. I don’t want boxes to show up on my doorstep. I get enough of that already. I want to be able to personally pick it up off of a physical shelf and look at it. I want to be able to find things on my own. That doesn’t seem to be possible anymore and if that’s the case, then I see no reason to do it at all. Without the thrill of the hunt, it’s just a credit card exercise.

No thanks. I pass on that.