I always have and always will believe that other than the speculator wave when it dried up the most damaging thing that ever happened to our hobby was the advent of packs priced so out of line hat no kid could realistically ever hope to collect. A generation or two of little businessmen sure , it created a ton of them. But it turned away a TON of potential collector's. When literally all your product is out of the price range of a small kid you create a customer base that can only shrink as while active true collector's aged and sadly passed no new blood was coming in drawn in by the inexpensive stuff. If you don't convince the kid's that the 10$ crack rock is tasty the industry will never even have them as a customer when it's time to introduce them to the more expensive real stuff. I see packs & boxes at dollar stores and the like but the packs have only a small % of what a real pack has and the boxes are "blasters" (another pet peeve for another day) so those are jokes. It's no small coincidence that when the hobby saw it's biggest boom was during an era when pack price was .50 to 1.00 , had a decent amount of cards & generally came 36 packs to a box. Now that can be both fun & affordable to break open stale gum , wax stains and all. 9.99 a pack , 3 cards a pack , 4 packs a box is over quicker than a scratcher and no fun at all. I started Home Run Hobbies when I was 13 years old and ran it in one form or another for the next nearly 30 years. As every year go's buy I see less and less collector's and more and more lottery ticket buyers & the high end old school collector's. It's been at least a decade since I saw a want list from anyone building a set. I have however for the last two decades watched many a people open a pack , put aside the one insert and just throw everything else in the trash. No one collect's set's any more. Well o.k.. certainly some. But it is cheaper to just buy a base set than it is to buy 5 packs most times. I remember a summer long hunt for 1989 Donruss 477 Craig Reynolds. A stupid common. But could it be pulled from a pack in my neck of Michigan.....almost no one that summer pulled it. A kid was more excited to pull a Craig Reynolds worthless card from an insanely over produced set than a Griffey , Jr. RC. Kid's didn't give up on the sports ard companies. The companies got greedy , and gave up on them. I know some agree some do not. Maybe a different region would provide a different perspective. But I heard it from the kid's mouths themselves over the years. When 3 packs is the same price as a video game why would anyone buy the cards. And at least in this area I don't think they will ever get them back at this point. Alright enough venting from an old man , those pesky kid's are on the lawn again and I gotta go chase em off ; )
