Such an interesting topic to me, as a former dealer (although in memorabilia.) The whole trick to making it work, of course, is the difference between what you pay (cost of goods sold) and what you sell for, minus your expenses. For common items, you have price guides, eBay completed sales, auction results, etc., to steer you in the right direction. But for rare or especially one-of-a-kind things, you're always guessing about what the market will bear for it and therefore how much to pay. That's why virtually every dealer of vintage material at a show is or was a long-time collector, no other experience or education will give you the information and sense to navigate that terrain successfully. To my knowledge, there is no such thing as somebody thinking, "I'm going to learn as much as I can in the next few months and become a vintage card (or memorabilia) dealer." I don't think anybody could make that work. In the case of graded cards, though, it is a mystery why any dealer would price much of his inventory well outside of what can be easily obtained elsewhere, perhaps multiple elsewheres. It would seem they are depending on luck, as in first-time buyers stumbling upon their site and figuring without any research that's what the market pays for what they're looking for. For the truly rare stuff, though, who is to say what the market really is? Maybe Dean or Levi is setting the market for things you can't find anywhere else. I suspect the reason they have been successful for so long while seemingly priced higher than the competition is that a consistently rising market has justified their prices over time, and that has become their actual business model. I can remember asking an autograph dealer friend about whose prices everyone complained why he didn't lower his prices a bit in order to sell more of his vast inventory, and this is what he told me: "I price everything by what I might have to pay to replace it." I thought about that and responded: "But that means you will always be perceived to be at least a little (or maybe a lot) ahead of the curve, and potential buyers will shy away and complain." But he did OK as it was, and it seems that Dean, Levi, and others with that philosophy are doing OK, too, so what's the use of complaining? We should rather be spending our time trying to find what we want at lower prices, or adjust our collecting to what is there to be had at what we're willing to pay. Of course, in the end this is all part of the fun of collecting, the challenges on the road to acquiring our beloved "stuff."
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