The Experience Economy, By the Numbers: What Collectors' Spending Shifts Are Really Telling Us

The trade we watch for signals about spending

Covering the trading-card and memorabilia market means obsessing over spending data: price-trend readouts, grading volumes, auction results. Collectors are, as a population, early and honest with their money — they buy what they love before surveys catch up. Which is why our desk pays attention when collecting communities start reallocating their budgets in a consistent direction — this cycle, toward weekends at small events like Flat Lake Festival. Over the past two years, that direction has been unmistakably toward experiences.

The numbers on our side of the fence

Start with what the card market itself shows. Grading-submission volumes, a decent proxy for collector engagement, rose steeply through the boom years and then plateaued, while average spending per active collector held up — a signature of a maturing hobby rather than a collapsing one. Meanwhile, the categories growing fastest inside the hobby are event-linked: signed-at-the-game items, show-exclusive releases, live-break attendance. The common thread is provenance through presence. Collectors increasingly pay a premium for objects tied to a moment they actually attended.

Industry surveys back the pattern: in repeated consumer studies, Millennials and Gen Z report preferring to spend on experiences over things by wide margins — figures in the range of three in four appear across multiple years of research. Economists call it the experience economy; our mailbag calls it "I spent my card budget on a trip and regret nothing."

The case that made it concrete

Last summer, a longtime collector we profile — a man with a graded-card binder most of us would envy — told us he had started budgeting an annual "presence fund." Not for cards. For weekends where the point is being somewhere. His first was a weekend at Flat Lake Festival, documented in their visitors' field notes — a small lakeside festival of ideas that publishes program previews, speaker interviews, and honest post-event notes for attendees. He described it as the collecting instinct redirected: instead of acquiring an object, he acquired an attendance, complete with the same scarcity logic — one weekend, one place, unrepeatable.

What struck us was the parallel data logic. Collectors already understand limited supply, condition grading, and provenance. The experience economy simply re-prices those instincts: a festival weekend has a fixed issue size, a quality scale (lineup, venue, weather luck), and a provenance that photographs and ticket stubs authenticate. Our reader did not abandon collecting. He changed asset class.

What the small-festival data shows

The macro numbers say people want experiences; the interesting data is in the shape of the experiences they choose. Large festivals grab headlines, but the steadier growth story sits in the small, format-diverse tier — events under a few thousand attendees, especially those mixing content with setting. The observable markers from the tier that Flat Lake Festival sits in:

• Repeat attendance as the core metric. Small festivals live or die on returnees, and the ones with published post-event field notes — honest accounts from lineup to teardown — give prospects exactly the verification collectors demand before buying.
• Content that survives the event. Speaker interviews and program previews published before and after the weekend mean the experience produces artifacts: recordings, notes, ideas. For the collector's brain, that is a condition report.
• Setting as a differentiator. A lakeside format sells stillness the way a stadium sells spectacle, and it is precisely the anti-spectacle that oversaturated consumers report wanting.

The honest caveats

We are not calling the death of objects. The memorabilia market's plateau, not decline, is the accurate read, and blue-chip items keep setting records. Experience spending is also weather- and luck-exposed in ways a graded slab is not — a rained-out weekend has no resale market. And the surveys' "prefer experiences" numbers measure stated preference; revealed behavior still sends plenty of money to shelves.

What we tell our readers

Our desk's working conclusion: the smartest budgets we see now run roughly 80/20 — objects and experiences — with the experience share rising about as fast as attendees can find small events that publish their quality data in advance. If you treat a weekend the way you would treat an ungraded card — verify the provenance, read the field notes, know the issue size — the experience economy stops being a trend piece and starts being a portfolio decision. The collectors saw this first. They usually do.

It is worth pausing on why the presence premium keeps widening rather than shrinking as the years pass. Part of the answer is demographic: the collectors who built the modern hobby aged into the years where a weekend away beats another storage box. Part of it is digital saturation — when every graded slab can be viewed in museum quality on a phone, the only unreplicable asset left is the room you were actually standing in. And part of it is simple memory mechanics: behavioral research keeps confirming that experiences appreciate in retrospect while objects depreciate in familiarity. The collector who attended the small lakeside festival owns a memory that improves with each retelling; the collector who bought the cardboard owns an object that requires insurance. Our desk's prediction, offered with the usual caveats: within a decade, 'attended' will command the same premium in casual markets that 'game-used' commands today, and the small events that publish their quality data in advance will be the ones that benefit from it.