A conversation with a couple veteran dealers at a card show

[steve B]

Having hung out at a lot of shops for different hobbies I've learned a little about what things look like from a dealers view.
So here's my take on things as a somewhat older collector. (Figure 40 years come September....I'll have to celebrate somehow!)

The time when they started was right during the big boom of the late 80's. Anyone starting then who survived has some idea what they're doing. I'd estimate that somewhere over 95% probably closer to 99% of stores and maybe 70-80% of dealers have folded up since then, Most of them in the mid -late 90's.

Inventory control in a hobby related business is really the key. Both control of how much is bought and what is bought, and in what's sold how quickly.

Some stuff is easily bought for very little, and should be moved along quickly.
Other things are harder to come by at a really good price, and those should be sold a bit more slowly.
A show dealer also has to have the right sort of stuff on display to attract buyers. Specializing is very helpful. I tried a couple times as a very generalized dealer and didn't do enough to keep trying. With no clear display of what I was about people were confused, and even if they stopped I didn't have a whole lot of whatever their particular interest was.
A shop has more overhead and has to be a bit more careful. The one local one that's still around doesn't do much really old stuff, and is really diverse, comics, pennants, whatever sells. They also move inventory very quickly once they see the demand shrink. One day I stopped in right after Curtis Martin went to the Jets. They were removing all of his cards from the showcase, plus packing up all the ones not in the case. Pre-Ebay they'd sold the whole inventory to a NY area dealer. Good move, they immediately moved what would soon be unsaleable inventory, and the NY guy got an instant inventory of what just became popular locally. (They're quite active on ebay now)

Small Ebay dealers can work more like that, buying stuff for nearly retail and moving it within a week or so with nearly no overhead. And since what they sell is searchable, there's no need to keep attractive inventory on hand to draw customers, just a constant stream of new stuff.


From the flip side, a good dealer either in a shop or at a show will usually have some knowledge about what they're selling. And a mindset that can take the answer to "Hi what do you collect" and pick out stuff from their inventory that might fit and that might not be on display or might be missed in a larger inventory.
They can -and should - also suggest other sort of related things to collect.
The really really good dealers can help guide a collectors collecting and collection to be a much better collection. Often by pointing out a special item that might not even be theirs.
They can also convey a lot more information about cards and sets that a buyer might not know.

When I was starting I wanted a T206, but was a bit too cheap to spring the 1.50 for a typical common. One day I went to the shop and they said "hey Steve we set a card aside for you" A T206! And horribly beat. but only .20!
A bit later they gave me a really beat P2 for free. After I moved away I came back to visit and shop while visiting friends. And was surprised they still had a box in the back room with my name on it. (Where a bit of interesting but largely unsaleable to anyone but me stuff ended up)


Sadly, not all dealers are like that. It's one reason so many washed out in the post 94 time period. Many of them were underfunded, and chasing product to have all the new stuff even if they lost money overall. And many of them didn't even know what something was if it wasn't in Beckett.

Steve B