Coincidentally I was just in the only surving shop near me on Friday. Was driving near by and had time to kill. I hadn't been there in 10 months, so I wasn't sure it was even still there. When I waked in the owner immediately recognized me because I think I am the only guy to come in there in years asking for vintage. I only started building vintage a few years ago, and this shop owner actually helped me build solid parts of a 51B and 53T sets.
Shop owner is a very nice guy, but I am not sure how he survives. Stacks and stacks of boxes and terribly unorganized. Mostly modern, but he has an aged inventory of vintage that he is sitting on. I am not even sure he knows what he has. I used to call ahead and give him a few days to dig through his floor to ceiling stacks of boxes to pull out stuff for me to look at. He is not acquiring any more vintage stuff, and probably hasn't for years, so when het gets rid of what little he has left, that's it. I don't think he even knows what he had into most of it, so is willing to give very reasonable prices - but he does know the value of what he has.
On Friday he said I should have called ahead because he couldn't get to anything that would interest me at that moment, but he did have a stack of 41PB and a few 33/34G and a couple T201s that were beat and split in half. Nothing that was priced very well so I just got a nice fix of browsing, some good talk, picked up a few 5x7 top loaders I needed and enjoyed killing about 45 mins.
|