Friday, April 26, 2013

Hobby Market Uptick

We're watching with curiosity the Senate's wrestling with the online sales tax. States with overblown budgets had been struggling with this issue for awhile, but more importantly brick and mortar stores have found the lack of online tax one more thing to compete against. If it passes it will probably help stores at least a little.

This comes on top of the news that the Hobby industry has seen four years of growth, at least according to Internal Correspondence where board games follow card games in pushing the market up 5-20% per year since 2008. This joins anecdotal evidence from distributors and consolidators that TLG works with. Kickstarter has of course given publishers and manufacturers a boost in capital, allowing them to invest in larger lines which help all the way around. The Kickstarter model reduces the risk considerably for a publisher as an item's worth is determined long before 10s of thousands are pumped into it.

Hobby Sales Up.

So all good news for the industry!

2 comments:

The 2 Half-Squads said...

I certainly don't mind seeing the online tax leveling the playing field for brick and mortar stores, but I hate to see money go to states that can't control their spending and corruption.
Jeff Hallett

maasenstodt said...

Since taxation is theft, and I have a problem with theft, I also have a problem with online taxation.

Having said that, we're already seeing inroads in the use of open source, encrypted currencies for online purchases. The more that governments attempt to control and extort rents from the marketplace with things like online taxes, the faster alternative currencies will gain acceptance. And that's a very positive thing, indeed.

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