State of the Hobby

Hehe...I'm active duty U.S. Air Force currently stationed in England.

 

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Here's the economics major "skinny" on my high DISregard for flippers. They are economic rent seekers, destroyers of the efficiency of the market. Economic rent seeking is attempting to acquire a higher percentage of the value of a commodity without adding any value to that commodity. It is the worst form of scum-sucking bottom-feeding. It is getting a return for zero value. It's theft, of a sort. Flippers, that's YOU.

 

Why? By that logic dealers shouldn't ever collect themselves as well. Almost every dealers collects in someway, it just isn't always in the material they usually sell. The days of one or the other are over. Dealers will be collectors and collectors will be dealers when they see fit. The internet made it very easy to do both.

The real problem is people being critical of others for how they choose to participate in the hobby or for what they collect. Flippers and speculating and investing isn't a threat to the hobby, it is very healthy to have that occurring and the extra participation. The time to worry is when everything has become so irrelevant none of that occurs.

So it is okay for you to sell but if someone else does they aren't a real collector?

There seems to be a few double standards going on in the various messages.

Because that's how dealers stay in business and a collector shouldn't be buying like a dealer from your other responses. Like you said "Pick a lane and stay in it"

 

Who said I care if dealers stay in business? I didn't, and I don't.

 

You stated earlier them going out of business as a reason why the hobby is dying and doomed

 

Here's the REAL disagreement:

You:
Flippers and speculating and investing isn't a threat to the hobby, it is very healthy to have that occurring and the extra participation.

I could not possibly disagree more if I tried to. I'd prefer my coin hobby with none of the above.

 

Some people have no other option. I do. They provide a service for SOME people in SOME circumstances and places. Where and how I live, they are pointless. I attend usually 6-7 auctions a month, some coin club, some public. I need no other source for older material. I do occasionally use others, but I can live without them.

 

I'd continue arguing, but not even my (considerable) eloquence could be any more damaging than what you're doing to yourself. Life is black and white to you; your perceptions are those of a blind man watching a rainbow.

 

I just picked up another coin auction "flyer" at the post office box. 500+ lots comprising well over 1000 coins. NO photos. NO Internet bidding. MANY key date coins, about 6-7% of them slabbed. 90+% raw, and the only way to bid is to be there or have an established phone bidding account. That's MY coin life.

 

You are correct - it IS black and white. There's truth and there's something else. I recently listened to Matt Dinger (Lost Dutchman) say on his podcast, "If a coin is raw, there's reason it's raw". It was a segment on problem coins. I almost peed myself. The single most ignorant sentence I ever heard come out of a pro dealer's mouth.

It assumes all coins worthy of slabs are already in them. What a bunch of dealer self-serving crap!

 

I prefer my hobby without other people trying to dictate to other people how they should be participating in it, but life isn't perfect.

That's the beauty of a hobby, everyone is free to participate in it in the way they choose too. No one gets to dictate to them how they should be collecting. They're in the hobby for their own enjoyment not to please you.

On one hand you say dealers going out of business is destroying the hobby and collectors should just be collectors. Then on the other you say you don't care about dealers and only buy coins how they do. So by your own logic that would mean you are contributing to the destruction of the hobby.

 

@baseball21 What part of "PUBLIC coin auction" do you need re-explained to you? I am the public. Perhaps the dealers are the unwanted, no? They're certainly the unintended audience, but it's a free country. There is a purpose for dealers. About 75% of my business with them is collecting supplies. You know, tubes, 2x2 boxes, Saflips, etc.

 

It sounds like you're describing most American business. We no longer try to make a better mousetrap so the world beats a path to our door, we try to make it cheaper without the customer noticing. We build moats around our business to exclude efficient competition then we shut the whole thing down and move to China.

I'm not sure I understand why you target "flippers" so much. These are the people buying new issues for profit? This has been going on for a long time and the only really bad disruption I see is that it artificially raises mintages making all products less desirable.

I suppose most of their buyers are losing money but this is their risk.

 

Why are they the unintended audience at an estate auction? It is well known that has been a way for them to stock inventory ever since dealers and auctions started. If resale should never be a consideration ever for a collector as you say, why not stop driving up the price of the inventory and support your local dealers to save the hobby if them going under is supposedly a mark of the hobby being doomed?

 

Cannot disagree with any of that. All good stuff. We don't even do value added that much anymore, and I submit that's why this will be the best our economy gets from now on until we decide to start actually building stuff again as a key part of our economy.

 

A lot of the flippers do too if they're not first to the market with the new hot item for most things.

 

Supplies, sir. Until department stores decide to sell collecting supplies again, the dealers (brick and mortar) have something I want. Besides, my lifelong business was destroyed by the digital revolution, "so let it be with Caeser."

The irony here is that lately I'm even buying more supplies at auction, but that's kind of new. I'm known at my coin club as the go-to guy for replacement plastic screw sets for Capitol holders. I got a bag of gazillion at an auction. I don't charge for them, I GIVE them away.

 

Look, I grew up in the 1960's in the town of Reading, PA, whose population ran in the 85,000 to 100,000 range most years. The county is about 400,000. When I got around on my Schwinn bicycle, there were 4 coin and stamp dealers in town, all with really full inventory. By 1985, they were all gone, ALL of them. None have reappeared since. That wasn't due to a bad economy or the internet, that was the demise of a hobby, in fact, two of them. Coin collecting is already a corpse, it just hasn't had the common sense to fall over yet. It survives as it is now by continuing to delude itself by denying that it's over, and that today's coin values, EXCEPT AT THE VERY HIGHEST END, are simply unsustainable.

The perception of rarity can only substitute for actual rarity for so long, then the house of cards collapses like the stinking Ponzi scheme it is.

Coin collecting and its prices are the epitome of the "greater fool" theory of value, and we're demographically and economically running out of fools. The only category of fools that seems unlimited is the Bullionista Fools. They'll take about 10-15 years longer to implode, but they will. Their ranks are being temporarily replenished by dishonest politicians and ideologies, but they too will collapse when the underlying ideology behind the bullionistas is revealed for the lie it always has been.

 

I tell you the hobby's been going to hell in hand basket ever since they stopped selling square hole kodar flips. And those ridiculous black and white coin photos replacing beautiful wood cuts? I tell ya, we're doomed...

 

Boy kurt, with your absence I almost forgot how lengthy a thread can get when you're around