This is a sad state of affairs, when people can’t even come to grips with the problem at hand. It came up earlier today when, in a discussion, I brought up the fact that it is virtually impossible to get modern worldwide stamps from dealers anymore. Nearly the past 30 years of stamps are a gigantic black hole with very few exceptions. If we can’t count on stamp dealers to keep supplying collectors, this hobby is going nowhere but down.

And I was surprised how many people got upset at the idea!

This has been going on for a long time now. The hobby is dying and everyone is trying to figure out how to revitalize it. Anywhere you go, you’ll see people trying to get young people into the hobby because the current crop of collectors, they’re dying off faster than they’re being replaced. This is a simple fact that it’s impossible to rationally deny.

So, lots of people are just denying it irrationally. I can’t tell you how many I’ve run into who think everything is rosy and there’s nothing to be worried about. The fact that every single metric that we have at hand shows otherwise, that doesn’t seem to matter. So long as they can keep sticking things in their albums until they finally keel over, that’s all that matters.

It’s also very short-sighted. There are things that we absolutely know for certain. We know that, starting in the late 1980s, the bottom has fallen out of the stamp market. Stamps that used to cost many thousands of dollars, they now go for hundreds. Ted Talks Stamps has a decent video on it that you can go to watch if you’d like, but every single metric that we have shows that this is true.

We also know that auction prices have  taken a nose-dive in recent years, even for big-name stamps like the 1c magenta. These stamps sell for less each time they come on the market. That is not a good sign.

We can also look at the slow death of the stamp show. I’ve talked about that before, how 40 years ago, these shows were everywhere and drew several times more dealers and attendees than they do today. We can look at the near extinction of the neighborhood stamp dealer as well. In fact, there is only 1 stamp-centric dealer within 100 miles of me and they’re in a tiny shop in a strip mall.

You can also look at the complete failure of Stanley Gibbons, whose stock is selling at less than 2 pence in the UK. They’re not long for this world and Scott isn’t doing so hot either. In fact, most of the powerhouses that once kept the hobby going, they’re all declining and going under. One of the larger manufacturers of stamp mounts went out of business last year, only to have their stock and manufacturing equipment snapped up by someone else. The hobby isn’t expanding, it’s contracting.

Oh, but you’ll heard it exclaimed. Online, stamp collecting is doing great! I just don’t think that’s true. It’s hard to get any hard numbers but even if you look at membership numbers for Hipstamp and Delcampe, those aren’t remotely close to the numbers we saw just a few decades ago. In fact, the whole reason that I brought up the availability of stamps these days is because the classic path into collecting has always been through getting stamps in the mail and buying recent issues at the post office. Most post offices refuse to sell single stamps anymore, you have to buy sheets or booklets or, they’ll slap one on your envelope but it just isn’t conducive to collecting single stamps. That’s not what the postal service is all about.

This brings me around to the response that I received, which was rather rude, if I’m honest. It was the insistence that philately is just fine, there are tons of people online buying stamps (without evidence that this is true) and the only people we ought to worry about are people in their 50s and 60s because those are the only stamp collectors that matter.

Yeah, it was that dumb.

I’ve also found a lot of people out there who are making the same observations that I am. Far too many current  collectors are hiding their heads in the sand at the grim future of our hobby. So long as they can collect until they die,  they don’t care about anything else. They don’t want to look at the numbers. They don’t want to be bothered with encouraging the young. They just want to be left alone to hide in their philatelic safe space where they don’t actually have to concern themselves with the reality because the reality is too depressing.

But if you can’t acknowledge that we have a problem, how can we ever hope to find a solution? Lots of sites are talking about it and have been for a long time. Linn’s, one of the few stamp “magazines” left, talks about it all the time. So does the APS, the largest stamp collecting group in the world. I don’t think they’re insane, I think they are just evaluating the evidence, unlike those who choose to hide away. We have a problem. How we’ll solve it, if we can solve it at all, that’s something that we’re going to have to address sooner rather than later.

If we wait too long, it will be too late. It may already be too late. The hobby will grind to a halt as people forget what stamps ever were. They’ll move on to collect other things and it’ll just be the few ancient old farts who persist until they can persist no longer. It’s a problem that we have to be willing to talk about but far too many aren’t. In fact, they are very adamant that no such problem exists, stop thinking about it, you’re out of your mind.

I honestly think it’s the other way around.