Someone who has never been to a major card show would find it hard to describe the energy that’s there. Graded slabs were stacked on rows of tables, dealers were negotiating in whispers, and collectors were squatting down to look at corners under portable LED lights. It smells like strong coffee and carpet from a convention center. Most of the time, the person across from you flew in from another state.
What’s different is the part about flying in from another state. People in the area used to come together on Saturday mornings to do hobbies, but now it’s more like a pilgrimage. The card show circuit, which includes the National Sports Collectors Convention and smaller regional shows that fill hotel ballrooms, is now a big reason why people travel so much. Not by accident. Meant to be.
AEG Global Partnerships did research on live music events and found that almost half of event fans have booked trains or flights to get there, and more than a third have booked places to stay near an event. The emotional reasoning behind that behavior—the planning, the excitement, and making the event the main focus of a trip—is very similar to what’s going on in the hobby world. Collectors don’t just go to shows anymore. They’re planning their weekends and even whole weeks around them.
When you look at what Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is said to have done for local economies—an estimated $4.6 billion in consumer spending in the U.S. alone, with fans spending an average of $1,300 per show on hotels, travel, and other costs—it’s hard not to see the connection. The numbers that are linked to card shows aren’t quite that big yet, but the behavior pattern is very similar. People are planning their budgets not only for what they will buy at the table, but also for the whole experience.
Tens of thousands of people attend the National Sports Collectors Convention every year, which moves between major U.S. cities. There are no more rooms at nearby hotels months before the event. Collectibles fans eat dinner together and talk about their PSA grades and pop reports. The show itself isn’t as important as the things going on around it—the side deals in the lobby, the meetups in the evening, and the feeling that this city belongs to the hobby for a few days. A sense has grown that the people who put on events are also starting to get this, and they’re starting to treat their shows less like trade shows and more like experiences that people come to enjoy.
There’s more to this than just nostalgia, though that does help. In the last few years, younger, wealthier collectors have become interested in the hobby. These aren’t old people getting shoeboxes out of the attic. Many of them are in their late 20s or early 30s and are used to spending money on experiences. They book flights like people did concert tickets in the past. They’ve seen other people treat hobby events as important enough to travel for, and they’ve taken that whole way of thinking on board.
It’s still not clear if the card show circuit will ever be able to compete with the amount of money that big music tours bring in. People spend their money in different ways, the audience is smaller, and not every show has the same pull. But, to use a figure of speech, the direction of travel seems pretty clear. People who collect cards are spending a lot of their extra money on trips related to shows, not just buying cards. It’s turned into a reason to go somewhere, which is something that most businesses would pay a lot to make.
When you leave a big show on a Sunday afternoon with more bags than when you got there, you get the sense that this is just the start of something that the economy as a whole hasn’t fully priced in yet.
