Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
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I love our hobby and our hobby community, but I must play a Cassandran role here...
I doubt that stamps in the traditional sense will be around fifty years from now; they will probably disappear much sooner than that. Coded mailing labels have already supplanted them. It sounds awful to say it, but traditional stamps are already superfluous to conducting postal business, just as they have been for private carriers like UPS and FedEx for decades. It's easy for us in the philatelic world we know and love to not fully grasp this fact. To my son's generation, the Millennials, postage stamps are already as anachronistic as telegram stamps.
Like you, I wonder if this ineluctable trend will make stamp collections more valuable, or less so. As long as there are stamp collectors, there will be a demand, but the "old" stamps will not become more scarce than they are right now (acknowledging a slight attrition rate), and the demand will diminish as we collectors die off, and our ranks are not sufficiently replaced.
Which leads to another gloomy point that we all already know: our numbers are dropping. I applaud all the efforts that are done to stimulate interest in our hobby among the youth, but there is one force that cannot be overcome: postage stamps have become irrelevant in popular culture. This has never happened in the history of the postage stamp until now. Think back to the days of FDR--the most influential man in the US in his time--who actively collected stamps and took personal interest in stamp production. This was a time when the postmaster general held a cabinet position! Think of the vital importance of the mail in everyone's lives in years past (right up to my own early adulthood in the 70s). This is simply no longer true for the current generation of young adults.
Driving another nail in the coffin, I invoke the history of EKKO stamp collecting. For a good, quick summary of EKKO stamps, read this article in Radio World. Once a popular hobby, there are now only a dozen or so serious collectors on eBay.
Yet, after I say all this (and say too much, I am sure), I still love stamp collecting! Let us allow future generations their own joys--and manias.
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I recently bought a number of small sheets of commemoratives for my usual mailings. As I pulled the self adhesive stamps from the sheet, I was wondering why they needed to be perforated. We don't tear them apart, but the perforations there are just for the appearance... kinda like the fake wood on station wagons!
I was thinking the other day that postmarks are pretty much a thing of the past. I went through all of our incoming Christmas cards to see if I could add any to my New Jersey postmark collection. Nope! Town cancels on regular mail are a thing of the past. The only cancels are the regional sorting centers!
All of the cards we got from our friends and family in Monmouth County, NJ were postmarked "Trenton, NJ" and that's not even accurate since the center is in Hamilton and that's about an hour's ride from where they were actually posted. And where I live in Eastern PA all my mail goes out with "Wilmington, DE" postmark, again 45 minutes from my home.
So I realize that any future additions to my postmark collection will be older purchased covers or philatelic favor covers handstamped at the counter. Depressing!
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And probably we all have had the experience, when we are mailing something at the post office, of the postal clerk being annoyed that we asked for the mail to be franked in stamps, not labels. The clerk has to fumble through drawers looking for the right combination of stamps instead of instantly printing the label at the press of button. I often feel compelled to defend my ODD request by explaining that I'm a stamp collector--which does not mollify the clerk at all!
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I think Doug's comments are the heart of the matter.... stamps are becoming (have become superfulous). So, it's possible that there will be collectors 50 years from now, but the EKKO comment also applies: if no one uses them, fewer folks will know, or care, of their existence.
In the US, USPS bears some responsibility for driving away established collecting areas (PBs, PNCs) and not finding ways to put more stamps on the diminishing flow of letters to help spark collecting imagination. But both are small parts of the equation; the bigger parts are competing interests (electronic games) and diminishing use of mail (volume is precipitously declining).
There will be a few collectors, but we'll be an ever rarer and odder breed. And, because of the sheer exponential growth of ever less needed stamps, WW collectors will by necessity, cease to exist, except as dealers, and then only as long as they can still turn a profit from the fewer collectors available.
But we probably have another two decades remaining, or about the time my wife needs to sell my collection.
David
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Two decades sounds about right, David. And by then I'll be ready to, as they say in philatelic obits, "close my album."
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I don't think stamp collectors will die out there will just be fewer of us.
Hand-pushed lawn mowers are obsolete,but people collect them. Typewriters are no longer used,but people collect them. Steam trains are dead, but people collect them.
I know of people who collect barbed wire, powder compacts ( what are they ? ) and vesta boxes. Some of these are very valuable ( like stamps ) but many are intrinsically worthless (like stamps).
I foresee that stamps will be collected as ephemera and historical artefacts rather than as stamps per se, and values will reduce, not just because of the falling number of collectors, but because the intrinsic value will become less. Those young people who do come to collecting will do so because they are interested in the item, rather than it's perceived value, because ultimately that will be nil.
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10:20:15pm
" .... I realize that any future additions to my postmark collection will be older purchased covers or philatelic favor covers handstamped at the counter. ...."
I went to a local post office in the Houston area and asked that the envelopes be hand stamped only to be told by the clerk that they do not cancel stamps at that facility.
I decided not to argue or leave the envelopes (all to SoR members) in the hands of someone who might damage the very nice arrangement of stamps so I held the envelopes and put them in a drop box in another area.
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11:35:11pm
Interestingly enough, as most of you know I work on the old Philatelic books from the 1800s and early 1900s that are in the public domain. As early as 1880, there are numerous articles written that said stamp collecting was just a fad that would pass by. I just finished a book that will be published here on SOR in a few months that was written in the early years of 1900s and it said that within 50 years stamp collecting would cease to exist.
Time and time again I read old articles that predict the end of stamp collecting.
True we are now in a complete different time period - the era of electronic everything. Those of us who learned to type on the standard type writers and for myself by the time I was in high school, my class was the first in the school to have electronic typewriters. I went off to university with a laptop that you had to manually pull up your word processor and my last year of university this new and exciting Windows 3.1 came out and the screen was *gasp* in colour!!!
Although we know the electronic age is here to stay, I predict that over the next 25 years we will also see people reverting back to some of the "old" ways. Even today as popular as Kindles and other e-Readers are for convenience, people still like to hold a book in their hands to read.
There will come a time when school systems begin to realise that removing cursive writing from curriculum and creating books that are "phonetically" accurate for students to read but are not actually English will be doing a number on the individuals when they go to university or try to get jobs. As the "baby boomers" pass on their jobs to younger generations and people who were born in the '60s and '70s age (yes, I know - that's my generation) - the kids that are in school now will be post-university level. What language skills will they have?
No, I predict that in time, people will come to realise that the way the current school-aged children are being educated is completely wrong and will revert to a combination of traditional as well as electronic methods, stamp collecting will continue on. Will it be with stamps that are post-2000, I doubt it - then again, those may become the "stamps" that are considered "the thing" by that time and what we consider to be the classics will definitely be the ancients and it will be interesting to see. God-willing, I'll still be here to take a gander.
When I think of my parents (may my Mum rest in peace) and see everything that they saw as the technology emerged, it baffles me and amazes me that people who are in their 70s and 80s are tackling the internet.
I remember in grade school when one teacher predicted that one day everyone would have a phone in their car. The class just laughed, we couldn't imagine that (heck, we were too busy worrying that the USSR would hit a red button and blow us all to kingdom come!). And yet, by the time I had graduated high school, there were some people who actually DID have car phones - I remember when my brother had one after he bought his Trans AM ("THE" car to have to show you were "somebody" and he bought a car phone). And now look at things. My Mum, God bless her, learnt how to use a cell phone and was text messaging like a pro within a month of me handing over my touch phone. My Dad, bless his heart, is doing the best he can to figure out how to use it. My Dad cannot set up a remote control, never learnt to use a VCR and forget a DVD player - if it's not on TV, it's not worth the hassle.
Stamp collecting will live on, in some way, shape or form - perhaps not the way we may do it today, but then again, collecting methods today are not what they were in the late 1800s or in the 1930s or 1980s. Time has modified it but despite the predictions that it will become obsolete (just like all the different religious groups who have predicted the end of the world over and over and over and yet we are still here), it will continue.
It has gained new audiences in countries that once were closed off to the world by the Iron Curtain. Perhaps one day it may not be a "European, North American" custom, but rather one that has extensive growth in other countries that do not yet have the pleasure of experiencing it - as we are still seeing countries who have gained independence from Colonial powers 40 years ago, still struggling to create their countries. When the wars finally end, they will need to "catch up" with things we have taken for granted, just like those who have emerged post-Cold War.
Stamp collecting will always exist in some way. I truly believe that.
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There is no question that stamp collecting will endure in some form. After all, there are some people who still collect telegram and EKKO stamps. For that matter, there are collectors of all kinds of obsolete artifacts. (And without question, stamps themselves will become obsolete--indeed, they already are.) But whatever the future of philately for later generations, the hobby will be vestigial compared to its heyday. That is the demise I am referring to.
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12:16:49pm
Collecting things that attract or amuse us is a old as living in a cave. It fulfills some human emotion. Ever since Uggh brought a couple of colored round pebbles back to his mate, humans and some animals have been mounting things on a nearby rock or a marble mantelpiece.
So while collecting stamps as we know it will definitely change, artifacts from the days when people made scribble marks on paper will be collected, accumulated and sometimes proudly displayed. I just won't be here to make smart assed remarks.
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and, it's nice that Ugg has been memorialized in footwear (he who started the insulated mammoth ped pad craze) as much as Phil A. Telly will be in paper goods.
But the real issue is will it be vibrant enough to sustain things like APS, CCC, etc. I think probably not, leaving the field to less top-heavy, more informal and more flexible groups like us. We can see SOR holding steady or growing slightly while APS hemorages at an unsustainable rate and newspapers and shops just evaporate (and long before the internet arrived on the scene as a possible suspect). This is not meant to toot SOR's horn, or be a play-by-play on a contest, but as my take on the lay of the future landscape. StampORama meet FutureRama.
David
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"So while collecting stamps as we know it will definitely change, artifacts from the days when people made scribble marks on paper will be collected, accumulated and sometimes proudly displayed. I just won't be here to make smart assed remarks."
Absolutely true for me, too. Our beloved hobby will still be around in some form, faded though it may be, long after I am gone and forgotten.
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50 years from now, will stamps as we know them today still be around? Will they be needed or will they just be a relic of the past? And if they become relics will our stamp collections become more valuable or just become obsolete (like 8-track tapes)? In 50 years I can imagine no home delivery of mail, all mail being metered (no postage stamp required) and mega-post offices to house everyone's P.O. box. I think USPS finances will eventually dictate no home delivery. Stamp collections will become more valuable with only a finite number of stamps on the market. But will it happen this way?
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
I love our hobby and our hobby community, but I must play a Cassandran role here...
I doubt that stamps in the traditional sense will be around fifty years from now; they will probably disappear much sooner than that. Coded mailing labels have already supplanted them. It sounds awful to say it, but traditional stamps are already superfluous to conducting postal business, just as they have been for private carriers like UPS and FedEx for decades. It's easy for us in the philatelic world we know and love to not fully grasp this fact. To my son's generation, the Millennials, postage stamps are already as anachronistic as telegram stamps.
Like you, I wonder if this ineluctable trend will make stamp collections more valuable, or less so. As long as there are stamp collectors, there will be a demand, but the "old" stamps will not become more scarce than they are right now (acknowledging a slight attrition rate), and the demand will diminish as we collectors die off, and our ranks are not sufficiently replaced.
Which leads to another gloomy point that we all already know: our numbers are dropping. I applaud all the efforts that are done to stimulate interest in our hobby among the youth, but there is one force that cannot be overcome: postage stamps have become irrelevant in popular culture. This has never happened in the history of the postage stamp until now. Think back to the days of FDR--the most influential man in the US in his time--who actively collected stamps and took personal interest in stamp production. This was a time when the postmaster general held a cabinet position! Think of the vital importance of the mail in everyone's lives in years past (right up to my own early adulthood in the 70s). This is simply no longer true for the current generation of young adults.
Driving another nail in the coffin, I invoke the history of EKKO stamp collecting. For a good, quick summary of EKKO stamps, read this article in Radio World. Once a popular hobby, there are now only a dozen or so serious collectors on eBay.
Yet, after I say all this (and say too much, I am sure), I still love stamp collecting! Let us allow future generations their own joys--and manias.
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
I recently bought a number of small sheets of commemoratives for my usual mailings. As I pulled the self adhesive stamps from the sheet, I was wondering why they needed to be perforated. We don't tear them apart, but the perforations there are just for the appearance... kinda like the fake wood on station wagons!
I was thinking the other day that postmarks are pretty much a thing of the past. I went through all of our incoming Christmas cards to see if I could add any to my New Jersey postmark collection. Nope! Town cancels on regular mail are a thing of the past. The only cancels are the regional sorting centers!
All of the cards we got from our friends and family in Monmouth County, NJ were postmarked "Trenton, NJ" and that's not even accurate since the center is in Hamilton and that's about an hour's ride from where they were actually posted. And where I live in Eastern PA all my mail goes out with "Wilmington, DE" postmark, again 45 minutes from my home.
So I realize that any future additions to my postmark collection will be older purchased covers or philatelic favor covers handstamped at the counter. Depressing!
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
And probably we all have had the experience, when we are mailing something at the post office, of the postal clerk being annoyed that we asked for the mail to be franked in stamps, not labels. The clerk has to fumble through drawers looking for the right combination of stamps instead of instantly printing the label at the press of button. I often feel compelled to defend my ODD request by explaining that I'm a stamp collector--which does not mollify the clerk at all!
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
I think Doug's comments are the heart of the matter.... stamps are becoming (have become superfulous). So, it's possible that there will be collectors 50 years from now, but the EKKO comment also applies: if no one uses them, fewer folks will know, or care, of their existence.
In the US, USPS bears some responsibility for driving away established collecting areas (PBs, PNCs) and not finding ways to put more stamps on the diminishing flow of letters to help spark collecting imagination. But both are small parts of the equation; the bigger parts are competing interests (electronic games) and diminishing use of mail (volume is precipitously declining).
There will be a few collectors, but we'll be an ever rarer and odder breed. And, because of the sheer exponential growth of ever less needed stamps, WW collectors will by necessity, cease to exist, except as dealers, and then only as long as they can still turn a profit from the fewer collectors available.
But we probably have another two decades remaining, or about the time my wife needs to sell my collection.
David
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
Two decades sounds about right, David. And by then I'll be ready to, as they say in philatelic obits, "close my album."
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11:38:32am
re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
I don't think stamp collectors will die out there will just be fewer of us.
Hand-pushed lawn mowers are obsolete,but people collect them. Typewriters are no longer used,but people collect them. Steam trains are dead, but people collect them.
I know of people who collect barbed wire, powder compacts ( what are they ? ) and vesta boxes. Some of these are very valuable ( like stamps ) but many are intrinsically worthless (like stamps).
I foresee that stamps will be collected as ephemera and historical artefacts rather than as stamps per se, and values will reduce, not just because of the falling number of collectors, but because the intrinsic value will become less. Those young people who do come to collecting will do so because they are interested in the item, rather than it's perceived value, because ultimately that will be nil.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
10 Jan 2016
10:20:15pm
re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
" .... I realize that any future additions to my postmark collection will be older purchased covers or philatelic favor covers handstamped at the counter. ...."
I went to a local post office in the Houston area and asked that the envelopes be hand stamped only to be told by the clerk that they do not cancel stamps at that facility.
I decided not to argue or leave the envelopes (all to SoR members) in the hands of someone who might damage the very nice arrangement of stamps so I held the envelopes and put them in a drop box in another area.
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A Service Dog gives a person with a disability independence. Never approach, distract or pet a working dog, especially when (s)he is in harness. Never be afraid to ask questions to the handler (parent).
10 Jan 2016
11:35:11pm
re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
Interestingly enough, as most of you know I work on the old Philatelic books from the 1800s and early 1900s that are in the public domain. As early as 1880, there are numerous articles written that said stamp collecting was just a fad that would pass by. I just finished a book that will be published here on SOR in a few months that was written in the early years of 1900s and it said that within 50 years stamp collecting would cease to exist.
Time and time again I read old articles that predict the end of stamp collecting.
True we are now in a complete different time period - the era of electronic everything. Those of us who learned to type on the standard type writers and for myself by the time I was in high school, my class was the first in the school to have electronic typewriters. I went off to university with a laptop that you had to manually pull up your word processor and my last year of university this new and exciting Windows 3.1 came out and the screen was *gasp* in colour!!!
Although we know the electronic age is here to stay, I predict that over the next 25 years we will also see people reverting back to some of the "old" ways. Even today as popular as Kindles and other e-Readers are for convenience, people still like to hold a book in their hands to read.
There will come a time when school systems begin to realise that removing cursive writing from curriculum and creating books that are "phonetically" accurate for students to read but are not actually English will be doing a number on the individuals when they go to university or try to get jobs. As the "baby boomers" pass on their jobs to younger generations and people who were born in the '60s and '70s age (yes, I know - that's my generation) - the kids that are in school now will be post-university level. What language skills will they have?
No, I predict that in time, people will come to realise that the way the current school-aged children are being educated is completely wrong and will revert to a combination of traditional as well as electronic methods, stamp collecting will continue on. Will it be with stamps that are post-2000, I doubt it - then again, those may become the "stamps" that are considered "the thing" by that time and what we consider to be the classics will definitely be the ancients and it will be interesting to see. God-willing, I'll still be here to take a gander.
When I think of my parents (may my Mum rest in peace) and see everything that they saw as the technology emerged, it baffles me and amazes me that people who are in their 70s and 80s are tackling the internet.
I remember in grade school when one teacher predicted that one day everyone would have a phone in their car. The class just laughed, we couldn't imagine that (heck, we were too busy worrying that the USSR would hit a red button and blow us all to kingdom come!). And yet, by the time I had graduated high school, there were some people who actually DID have car phones - I remember when my brother had one after he bought his Trans AM ("THE" car to have to show you were "somebody" and he bought a car phone). And now look at things. My Mum, God bless her, learnt how to use a cell phone and was text messaging like a pro within a month of me handing over my touch phone. My Dad, bless his heart, is doing the best he can to figure out how to use it. My Dad cannot set up a remote control, never learnt to use a VCR and forget a DVD player - if it's not on TV, it's not worth the hassle.
Stamp collecting will live on, in some way, shape or form - perhaps not the way we may do it today, but then again, collecting methods today are not what they were in the late 1800s or in the 1930s or 1980s. Time has modified it but despite the predictions that it will become obsolete (just like all the different religious groups who have predicted the end of the world over and over and over and yet we are still here), it will continue.
It has gained new audiences in countries that once were closed off to the world by the Iron Curtain. Perhaps one day it may not be a "European, North American" custom, but rather one that has extensive growth in other countries that do not yet have the pleasure of experiencing it - as we are still seeing countries who have gained independence from Colonial powers 40 years ago, still struggling to create their countries. When the wars finally end, they will need to "catch up" with things we have taken for granted, just like those who have emerged post-Cold War.
Stamp collecting will always exist in some way. I truly believe that.
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
There is no question that stamp collecting will endure in some form. After all, there are some people who still collect telegram and EKKO stamps. For that matter, there are collectors of all kinds of obsolete artifacts. (And without question, stamps themselves will become obsolete--indeed, they already are.) But whatever the future of philately for later generations, the hobby will be vestigial compared to its heyday. That is the demise I am referring to.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
21 Jan 2016
12:16:49pm
re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
Collecting things that attract or amuse us is a old as living in a cave. It fulfills some human emotion. Ever since Uggh brought a couple of colored round pebbles back to his mate, humans and some animals have been mounting things on a nearby rock or a marble mantelpiece.
So while collecting stamps as we know it will definitely change, artifacts from the days when people made scribble marks on paper will be collected, accumulated and sometimes proudly displayed. I just won't be here to make smart assed remarks.
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
and, it's nice that Ugg has been memorialized in footwear (he who started the insulated mammoth ped pad craze) as much as Phil A. Telly will be in paper goods.
But the real issue is will it be vibrant enough to sustain things like APS, CCC, etc. I think probably not, leaving the field to less top-heavy, more informal and more flexible groups like us. We can see SOR holding steady or growing slightly while APS hemorages at an unsustainable rate and newspapers and shops just evaporate (and long before the internet arrived on the scene as a possible suspect). This is not meant to toot SOR's horn, or be a play-by-play on a contest, but as my take on the lay of the future landscape. StampORama meet FutureRama.
David
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re: Mailing a letter..... in the year 2066!
"So while collecting stamps as we know it will definitely change, artifacts from the days when people made scribble marks on paper will be collected, accumulated and sometimes proudly displayed. I just won't be here to make smart assed remarks."
Absolutely true for me, too. Our beloved hobby will still be around in some form, faded though it may be, long after I am gone and forgotten.
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