Those are great questions and all valid points. There hasn't been a card shop in my little town for nearly 20 years and, back then, there was no eBay, mem cards or $500 per pack boxes. Just relatively inexpensive packs of cards with the opportunity to pull great cards for the money (Ex: 1992-93 basketball with Shaq rookie-$1.50-$2 a pack) The LCS here had a Bid Board that the owner would load up with misc. cards on Monday and have an auction for them at 5 P.M every Friday. Man, you had to squeeze your way in there on a Fri. night and there was always good stuff up there (I got my 1971 Topps Nolan Ryan off of that board for $25 in 1992). But today, with the huge selection on eBay, it's hard to imagine something like that working as well as it did back then. I would guess the profit margin is much less with the high end stuff nowadays as well: less clientele who can afford it and less product. One thing I think shops could do is set up a trading network with their customers on a site such as this so that everyone who frequents the shop could try to find someone, anywhere in the country, who would be interested in trading their Milwaukee Brewers, for example, for your St. Louis Cardinals. In my experience here in Wisconsin, very few people hanging out at the card shop here was interested in trading ANY of their Brewers, Packers or Bucks away which sometimes made it quite difficult to get nice cards of your favorite players. I apologize for the rambling, long post. Thanks for the great thread!
Collecting Robin Yount, Brewers Topps parallels, Brewers autos and Jonathan Lucroy in a Brewers uni.
Lucroy Brewers Collection : 589/596 non 1/1's (98.8%) and 65 1/1's
Lucroy Brewers Collection : 589/596 non 1/1's (98.8%) and 65 1/1's