Does Anyone Here Collect Stamps?

Join the stamp forum. It is really almost gone like Kanga said, only certain stamps fetch some sort of money. Thats why you see way more coin stores than stamp stores, in fact, I can only think of one right now, being Kenmore

Forgot. There are a ton of online stamp stores. I have no idea whether or not the hobby is dying but I can tell you there are a lot of places to buy them.

Ok. Once I hit 250 posts, could I try trading my stamps for coins in the for trade section?

As for it being dead -

It may vary from country to country. There still are people who will buy (and search) bulk lots.

Myself, I collected Polish stamps from 1984 until 2001. The prices of the quarterly sets were constantly rising to uncomfortable levels. I collected them until I saw the catalog prices. "0.10" everywehere. That's in Polish zloty, divide by 4 for USD. And on top of that, as it has already been mentioned, the catalog prices for stamps are far from their real value. You divide them by 5, 10, etc. depending on the catalog to get an actual price. As it turned out to be a complete waste of money, I cancelled my subscription. Years later, I used whatever was still valid for postage and sent the rest to the first person who asked.

Today, the prices of quarterly sets are getting ridiculous. While we don't have $16 stamps, there has recently been a surge in issuing high value stamps, unnecessarily expensive sheetlets, and "limited" items. I'm glad I'm not buying those anymore.

Resale value? As long as they are still postally valid, they will keep their value. There is no "dicount postage" market here. But the earlier series are nearly worthless: you can get a whole year's worth of Polish stamps which are no longer valid for postage for $2 (mint) and as low as $1 (cancelled). That's how much they're worth. Hence, moxking's "99.8%" statement.

The local coin and stamp store does have stamps and stamp stockbooks. During one of my recent visits, I have actually asked about this fact. His response has been along the lines of 'the hobby isn't dead, every day we have someone who buys stamps and we constantly add new material to our stock'.

That said, during my recent visits there, I have seen other people buying/submitting wantlists/selling/trying to sell/looking at coins (and more rarely - banknotes) but I haven't noticed anyone even looking at stamps so far.
At the local monthly show which I attended once this year, I'd say there were around 3/5 stalls with coins only, 1/5 with mixed stuff (coins, medals, military memmorabilia, random stuff like spoons etc.), and about 1/5 with stamps. The difference between the coin and random stalls and the stamp one was: no buyers at the stamp stalls. Having asked about it at another coin shop, they explained "it's just dealers exchanging stock between themselves", and that's exactly what it looked like.

Perhaps nearly all stamp trade is now being done using the Internet.

I got a popular book on stamp collecting a few years back - can't recall from where - and it reminded me of one of the main reasons why I went into coins but never liked stamps: there are too many.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I know there's a lot of assorted coins. (Especially if we're getting into ancients and medievals.) But that's nowhere near the variety of how many stamps there are.
Like, for coins, a type set for a country in a decade would normally be something like 10-20 coins (less if you're lucky, a bit more if you're including the really rare stuff); for stamps, you're looking at many hundreds, easily (and most of them would be common), and that's not counting the special issues for parts of said country (less common lately, but still).


...Right now, my stamp collection consists of a Russian set showing various old coins (bought at the main Moscow post office in 2011 when I got angry that they didn't have any actual coins on sale), a few old Russian stamps with back inscriptions certifying them for use as currency (bought as essentially paper money), and a bunch of random stamps (mostly Russian and Belarussian) that I (or my relatives) actually received on letters.
A few years ago there was also that one 1970s Soviet stamp that I randomly found on my old apartment's floor in 2006 (just before the big move), but I hadn't seen that one anywhere lately.

I did find an envelope what appeared to be my dad's old stamp collection one day in 2009 or so; didn't really have the time to look through, so just put it back where I thought it was.
Never saw the darn thing again, and the desk I found it on isn't standing in that room anymore, so it could really be anywhere; maybe my dad found that envelope himself and threw it away.

Say what?

I used to collect stamps back in the 70's, as a teen. Stamp club through the mail where they'd send you stamps and you could purchase what you'd like and sent the rest back.

I didn't realize until after I married that my wife had a fairly large collection. We still have it.

Yes, that is correct. I have received a few 1940s US stamps on mail myself, so some people do use them. That alone speaks volumes about their value.