The comment about the boomers is exactly right. There's no way that post-war prices stay as high as they are, long term. Baseball card prices are driven, in large part, by nostalgia, and when the people who are nostalgic for Mantle can just watch the guy playing on the other side of the pearly gates, that force driving prices is going to crater. The post-war market will come to resemble the pre-war market, which of course still has its high points, but doesn't have the force of nostalgia driving it.
As for card shops: I suspect that selling unopened modern is just an easier way to go. It's basically just a commodity. You can get a pretty good sense of how much product you're going to move each month, you put in an order for that much from Topps, and you've got a predictable income stream. Selling vintage is more work (you've got to hunt down collections that you can profitably flip), and much less predictable. If whether or not I eat next month depended on how many cards I sell, I could totally see ignoring vintage.
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