Thanks @Tripolar for ending my hijack before it gathered more steam.
Ref this
I agree there’s been a decline in dedicated small retail female-oriented hobby shops. As you say. And we agree there’s been a decline in male oriented small hobby shops too. We could probably quibble about which decline is more severe or complete, but that’s small potatoes compared to …
The (IMO) elephant in the room: The gigantic growth in big-box female hobby / craft shops and the absolute total 100% absence of any competing product in the male space.
Yes. I know about Home Depot / Lowes. But hardware stores and homeowner DIY were almost certainly larger markets relative to GDP or per capita back in the day than now. Everybody’s Dad did DIY; many of our kids not only don’t, but can’t. No interest, no skills, no experience. and therefore no tools or materials from HD/Lowes.
I’d make the same argument about e.g. NAPA auto parts. I was a gearhead in HS & college. As were many teens in those 1970s. In my father’s post-WWII era, damn near any man/boy who could afford a car at all worked on it and or hopped it up. By comparison to those days, car mods and personal car maintenance are dead, dead, dead. When was the last time you saw a “speed shop” catering to selling car nuts all the go-fast accessories?
If someone wants to argue that a lot of the sales volume has moved online and is hence invisible to casual drive-by inspection, I won’t disagree at first. Clearly it has for retail goods in general.
But I will ask them to justify why that shift to online is, or should be, vastly different for traditional male versus traditional female hobbies. And especially if one recognizes that most male hobby toys, tools, and materials are bigger, heavier, and dirtier than the more traditional female toys, tools, and materials. I.e. lumber is sold in a yard; fabric by the yard. Big, heavy, and dirty, are the antithesis of what goes nicely in the online Amazon + UPS model.
I’m not sure that traditional male hobbies have collapsed while traditional female ones have thrived, but so far the evidence cited against seems to me to be mostly beside the point: largely true but also largely irrelevant.