Card Industry: Down Now...But Up Later? [J. Mark English]

A friend referred me to an article by Dave Jamieson of Slate.com offeringa requiem for the status of baseball cards today:

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. "They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold," Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker "Mr. Mint," told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece.

Yes, the card industry is in a funk. This may not be bad for collectors though. As the price of cards continue to spiral on downwards, this could have an affect of clearing out the over abundance of cards from the 80's. If Mr. Jamieson, and those in similar positions decide to throw away their worthless collection, with in years, the cards from the eighties will begin to become scarce.

Scarcity is what drives the card business. Increase the scarcity, and boom, your collection will be worth something. Just convince your friends and neighbors to throw out all their old cards first, and years from now the value of your collection will soar.