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Collectors and Hobbyists –the DEMOGRAPHICS:
A while ago I wrote on The Psychology of Collecting: It's kind of a mental thing –running the gamut from a mild quirk to a full blown mental illness. I stress that we all have this quirk to one degree or another. (My own quirk, fr'instance, runs to books, tools and empty barbque sauce bottles.) But what was interesting was how many people seemed to find my ruminations on the topic interesting and wrote back. With this in mind, I offer another take on the world of people who are truly committed to their hobby, but this time with numbers. Not particularly valid numbers, but interesting numbers none the less.
SLICE #1 --the Most Popular Hobbies: This is from Yahoo's GROUPS.... I'm not sure what the noun would be .... 'portal' perhaps. It's a list of bulletin-boards started by various hobbyists. Other hobbyists then surf along and post stuff –opinions, questions & answers, pictures of stuff they have made / collected / found / whatever. Pretty neat actually. People helping people and all. With any statistical abstraction, it's important to ask yourself what does it really say. Seems to me that the following is not so much a picture of how many folks are involved in a given hobby, but rather how many people are involved in a given hobby AND are internet savvy. My own interest in woodworking –for instance- comes in a little lower then I might have suspected, but are the good-old-boys (and girls) who are into making saw-dust also computer geeks? Some are certainly, but not as many as electronic hobbyists for example. Computers operate –as I understand them- with electricity to one degree or another. Notice the popularity of ham-radio as a hobby. Comes in higher then wood-working, and these people can talk to one another on their radios for-goodness-sake. Why would they be attracted to posting things on the internet? Beats me, but numbers don't lie. Except -of course- when they do. I begin with what Yahoo calls simply "Groups". Here are the number of bulletin-boards for each of Yahoo's groups -smallest to largest:
Notice that Hobbies and Crafts really is not that big a category. More important -or more interesting then Government by a few percent, but bupkis compared to things like Entertainment and the Arts or Education. None the less, lets have a look at just how Hobbies and Crafts breaks out.
Beginning with the smallest category, Models, (Home Repair etc doesn't have sub-categories), we have the opportunity to draw some totally unsubstantiated -yet interesting- conclusions about men & women and their hobbies.
From Models, we move on to Collecting. ("Other" doesn't have sub-categories either.) The list of Collectables is way too big to put on a bar-graph, so I offer the above just to give you a feeling of the relative popularity of a few selected collectables. The entire list –with numbers- follows:
From collecting as a hobby, we move on to hobbies as a hobby!!??! One would suspect that collecting ought to be listed as a hobby, but t'aint so. To some degree, if only semantically, collecting is a hobby, but if you scroll up and compare the number of groups dedicated to collecting to those dedicated to hobbies, you find about 19 to 25 thousand. We might just say that collecting is so ubiquitous a hobby as to be something besides a hobby and have done-with-it. None-the-less, here are the numbers for HOBBIES:
Finally, we come to what Yahoo calls "Crafts":
SLICE #2 -How Much People Spend on their Hobbies: This (these?) data come from the
2005 is the most recent year for which I was able to find data. I'm guessing these numbers tell us more about the economy and people's willingness to indulge themselves. Up just a tad in '05
I'd have expected these number to go up more then they did. Appears that the richest people are actually less entertaining then the next to richest. Might have something to do with keeping up with the Joneses.
Looks like the best time to have fun is after you retire. Not a surprise, but nice to see it quantified.
These next tables need a little explanation. The Department of Labor and it's sub department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics deals with the modern "mixed / blended / extended / whatever" family by using what they call a "unit." A unit is 2.5 persons, 0.6 children under 18, 0.3 people over 65, 1.3 earners, and 2 vehicles. Don' ask me why, but it seems as good a solution as any. In any event, I don't know what to make of the numbers above. Considering the table below, it appears that newlyweds have a lot of fun, not so much after baby-makes-three, but when the little dear has grown up a tad, fun ensues again -or the little dear needs lots of expensive toys & crap to keep himself out'a trouble.
Not at all sure what to make of the previous. Unemployment doesn't seem to have much effect on how much we spend on having fun, A little, but not so much.
Now this is interesting. Evidently a mortgage is a particularly onerous thing. Or does it tell us more about retired folks? The 4.2% for the poor renter surprises me a little. And look how much fun the rural folks are having. Is this because this is where all the retired people live, or is it too boring otherwise in the country?
I decided to include the absolute numbers in this one. I have to -I'm a teacher and therefore a big fan of staying in school.
I was thinking about not including the race stuff because I find it all a little overdone and distasteful. But then I had a closer look at the numbers. Here's the kicker -the Asian expenditures -and income- is the highest in the bunch. They are too busy learning and earning to be bothered with fun & games.
No surprises here -we have more fun out west then the rest of the country. Apparently by a goodly amount too!
Now this surprises me. I thought we had seen from above that retired folks spent more of their money on entertainment then us working stiffs. But this slice puts then down there below the poor service workers. Don't know what to make of this. I double checked and all, so I have to conclude there is something about their definitions of methods that I don't understand. Such is part of the fun of statistics.
SLICE #3
-Some Random Facts / Fact-lets:
According
to Craft and Hobby Association,
sewing is the largest hobby in America with related purchases of about
$2 billion and and wood-working is second with sales of $1
billion.
Also,
The U.S. craft and hobby industry was tracked in 2006 at $30.2 billion
for annual retail sales. 57 percent of US households
participated in crafts that year and the annual spending per crafting
household averaged $476. Sales
to scrap-booking fans ran $2.55 billion in 2004. Scrap-Booking
In America sez.... Scrap-bookers
are most likely to be females between the ages of 30 and 50.
Eighty-two percent have a college education and nearly 50 percent are
employed full time. 24.5% of US homes did some scrap-booking in
2004. ....and....
The combined sales for Hobby Lobby and Michaels, by the way, is about
5 1/2 billion dollars. You do a little math and this works out to
$18 for every man, woman, and child in America. Do a little more
math, (& make an assumption of who spends money in such places), and
you find that every woman in America spends -on average- $54 in just
these two stores. And I can hear it now -some woman somewhere is
making the snotty comment about men, boys, toys and Home
Depot. Admittedly, the per-capita sales for Home Depot, and
Lowes -and just these two businesses- is $457. Now I don't
know about the store in your neighborhood, the ones I go to have bigger
and bigger aisles selling fru-fru appliances and the aisles selling
tools, RPM, horse power, and such-like men's 'toys' are getting smaller
and smaller.
Lest all
of this seem unrelentingly silly, consider the history of crafts and
hobbies -or as much of it as I'm old enough to remember.
Remember giant resin grapes / balls in the early 60's? Stained
glass in the late 60's candle-making in the early 70's, (according to
one source, candle making peaked in the late 90's at just under $2
bullion in annual related sales)? Macramé in the late 70's, and
in the early 80's we were all too busy with blow-driers and
disco-dancing as I recall. Then along came computers and a hot economy and we
were all entirely too busy to do hobbies till this scrap-booking thing
came along.
I'd love to hear
from you about what you might remember as the trendy hobbies from the past.
E-mail me at wharvey904@hotmail.com
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