Forty years ago, when I started in the stamp business, there were twenty stamp auction houses in the United States holding several hundred auctions per year. Today there are only ten holding not many more than fifty auctions. Even before the Internet and the sales platform of Ebay (where everyone can participate in auctions all of the time), there was a dramatic falloff in mainstream stamp auctions.
There are several reasons why this has occurred. First, over the last thirty years stamp prices, like most commodity prices, have not kept pace with inflation. My estimate is that a general basket of fine collectible postage stamps can today be bought with about half as much real money as that basket could have been purchased for thirty years ago. Sure, prices of most stamps have gone up, but values of most things have gone up even more. My 1980 Toyota cost me $5,600. Today it would be $20,000. Stamps have not gone up four times in the same period. This is not a scientific economic analysis, but the implications of it are felt by every stamp auctioneer. We are selling at prices that haven't kept pace with inflation; so our costs have gone up at a much faster rate than our commissions. The auctioneers that have thrived are the ones that either have cut costs efficiently or sell at the highest end of the market where prices and egos are the strongest.
Stamp collecting has gotten nicheier. Most collectors used to maintain a general collection so that if they got an auction catalog they could always find something to bid on if they were in the buying mood. Today's collectors are often so highly specialized that even Ebay's hundreds of thousands of listings per week rarely offer them anything to buy. Thus, there is less bidding for each auction catalog mailed than before, further increasing costs.
And then there has been a decline in regional support in philately. Every major city and many minor ones boasted a philatelic auctioneer thirty years ago who could count on the support of local collectors to both buy and sell in their sales. Today, few collectors leave their home to collect. This can be seen in the decline in stamp clubs and shows.
These stamp auction houses that continue seem to be quite successful. They have gravitated to various ends of the market. Apfelbaum's has been successful by concentrating on the higher end