Allan,

Your definition of "ruin" is very liberal indeed: "Slabbing did not ruin coin collecting, sport card collecting, or stamp collecting. Those hobbies still have collectors." If your only criteria of whether a hobby was ruined is if there are any collectors, then NOTHING will ever "ruin" a hobby. Slabbing caused a LOT of collectors to leave their love of collecting coins & sportscards. The few collectors that remain REFUSE to buy slabbed coins or cards. The new breed of collectors/dealers will buy a mint bag and submit all the coins they think will grade high enough for them to profit to be slabbed and then return the remainder to the bank... or will buy a box of cards and send the "inserts" and star cards to be graded and slabbed and the rest becomes junk (literally). Does anyone realize how many beanie babies, sportscards and coins are produced? Have you ever really tracked prices of these items? They sell very high when they first come out, because we are a society in need of instant gratification! We have to be the first of our peers to own that item! Once the market is saturated, prices decrease substantially! The slabbing companies have a registry to register your coins... to make it more competitive... to make more money because now everyone wants to have the "best" collection! I've tracked coins, baseball cards and beanies. Beanies are very volatile with the exception of a very few produced in very limited numbers... but they too, will fall hard. Coins will always have some collectors, but the majority will be investors/speculators. Sportscards are a sad sight... PSA is the main slabbing company. Their registry has caused prices to soar, because most people in their right mind would never have had a common card graded. But, due to the registry, $.25 cards are being graded at the deepest discounts of $6 each! Here's a sad example... 1970 Kellogg's 3-D cards were NOT collected and NOT especially liked by the majority of collectors. There are a LOT of stars in the set, and most of these cards (which you could buy a complete set for less than $10BF (Before Registry)) go for $10 EACH! The ones with low population (20 or less) sell for $50-200 each. There were the same # of each card produced. There were no short prints! They all should have the same value, or at most a few stars should carry a premium. The unknowns are the expensive cards... because until the Registry came to existence, there was no need to slab a common $.05 card (which are now worth $50-200 because they're slabbed). How many collectors do you think began collecting beanie babies because they liked them... or how many do you think starting buying beanie babies because it was all over the media that there was money to be made in beanie babies? This mentalitiy came from the substantial growth in prices realized when slabbing entered the coin and sportscard hobbies. It not only ruined those hobbies, but most hobbies in general!

Now you can see why coins and sportscards were "ruined" by slabbing companies. The slabbing companies replaced collectors with investors/speculators. If you weren't involved in the hobbies... you cannot have seen how substantial the impact was.

The true hobbyists in sportscards collect tobacco cards and have been very successful in keeping slabbing out to a great degree. The true hobbyists in coin collecting collect ancient coins and have kept slabbing out to a great degree.

I'm exhausted... I guess my last words would be: If you're old enough to remember the enjoyment you got as a youth collecting coins, stamps, sportscards, whatever... you can remember "collecting"! If you jump forward to today, the youth view ever item they collect as an investment. Thanks to the false markets the slabbing companies create and the billions of limited edition items we've seen as result... YES.... Billions!