Continued from prior post.
The fifth retailer is my Favorite. I buy almost everything there despite one drawback which I'll get to in a moment. They are in the same mall as the last retailer (the one nearest me) and their staff seems to know quite a bit about HL and some even collect themselves. They have about 40 pieces on display and let you handle them to your hearts content. Despite the clutter, I rarely find things broken, and when I do, they remove if from display. They will order pieces for me and let me do layaways and are pretty flexible, and will keep me posted on HL things coming up, or if they are going to market to place an order, etc, etc. They seem to have a steady flow of HL customers ranging from Pretty impoverished looking to pretty affluent looking folks. The whole gammut of people and everyone is welcome. No one gets a hard time or anything. Even "rough" looking people who are clearly not in there to shop. Their downside is that they have the nasty habit of trashing the custom foam packing on about half of the HL pieces that I buy there in order to save space. They keep the box & fold it with its papers but usually only have the foam if they happen to have another duplicate piece in the stockroom. ie; most display HL's don't have the original packing foam at this store. You just get foam peanuts. Nevertheless, they seem to do brisk business and I like going there. I buy almost all my HL's there.
The sixth retailer is a branch of the store mentioned above but at a different mall. It's smaller yet they ALWAYS have all the packing materials (AMAZING)! Their staff also knows quite a bit about HL's and some of them also collect. Also very friendly and let me or anyone else browse to their hearts content. They too will do special orders or search their main warehouse for you if you want something. I also buy there once in a while & they know I frequent both stores.
For the life of me I don't know how the first 2 STAY in the HL business. The lack of inactivity there CAN'T be helping promote HL's. I expect they will discontinue soon or eventually. The other 4 are obviously moving product (but for different reasons) I expect that there is a 50/50 chance that the 3rd & 4th may discontinue. # 5 & 6 seem to be expanding and are getting ready for the new HL introductions.
One last comment in the folowing post.
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JB
[This message has been edited by JUL (edited 01-02-100).]
