A dear friend wrote me the other week. He had been watching a number of old Antiques Roadshow episodes and had noted the steady decline in values offered over the last three decades. It has been a phenomenon that most of us have witnessed going back to the 1990s when million-dollar prices were being paid for American furniture. In my mind, the issues about the decline in antiques as an investment is really about two things. First is that I think the 1972 to 2007 period was a bubble in the antiques market. The bicentennial began to fire passions that reached a fevered pitch by the 1990s when it came to antiques. There was money in the hands of people who never thought they would collect, and there were old collectors who were cashing in their holdings and retiring to Florida. I recall a young collector who inherited what turned out to be a world-record Windsor chair. He sold the chair for a fortune and bought a reproduction. Why? One broken spindle caused by one of his young children could destroy half the value. He wasnt wrong. Recall though that before the 1970s, antiques collecting was the purview of the rich, those who had money and time to pursue antiques. It was not a middle class passion. Prices for some areas, because the market was small, did not rise quickly. Antiques by the 1990s were the hot commodity. Why? Because the pundits all said that antiques would never go down in value. It was a safer bet than stocks. There were even investment funds that promised futures in certain art and antiques. And then the financial crisis happened, people bailed on their investment collections and they suddenly realized that demand dictated price rather than what they paid for it. If there were only five rich collectors who wanted Gaudy Welsh, what happened when two went broke, one died, one took up golf and one remained? This is what burst the bubble. So what about today? In my mind, and I am preaching heresy to say this, but I think the problem is the word antiques. My daughters and their friends thrift, they love retro shops, they buy nostalgia. The word antiques is never used, but rather it is about language that suggests both value and memory. My daughter who works in the auction world and I talk about how her age peers, if they understood how an auction worked, would be attending every sale. But no one has taught them about it, and the words antiques and decorative arts scare the hell out of them. So the auctions and shows and traditional dealers squawk about a lack of young collectors, and yet I can walk into the vintage, nostalgia and retro shops on South Street in Philadelphia, and it is standing room only. The millennials and Gen Z love old stuff. Its low carbon footprint. Its fun. Its great design. Its in their memories from grandparents or great grandparents. And it is not the intimidating world of antiques. I am sure my diatribe will get some folks riled up. If so, I am sorry, but I hope it also gets you thinking about it all. The trade needs to not assume, as one group of dealers suggested some years ago, that young people have bad taste and need to be educated about what is good. Rather the trade needs to see it is a brave new world that we need to understand on its terms and embrace. Born to collect should be the motto of Peter Seiberts family. Raised in Central Pennsylvania, Seibert has been collecting and writing about antiques for more than three decades. By day, he is a museum director and has worked in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Virginia and New Mexico. In addition, he advises and consults with auction houses throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, particularly about American furniture and decorative arts. Seiberts writings include books on photography, American fraternal societies and paintings. He and his family are restoring a 1905 arts and crafts house filled with years worth of antique treasures found in shops, co-ops and at auctions.