I could put a couple of chapters of my glove book on the Play It Again Sports stores. They have two or three here in Dallas. The closest, only a few blocks away from me, opened about 1992 or so and immediately I picked up a nice near mint USA Mantle and a really stout Bob Allison Wilson gloves. Since those days, I've probably bought 40 or 50 gloves from PIAS stores in the last 15 years, usually at very fair prices. I've let the stores know what I do and even provided them with guides as I want to treat them right. They'd hold gloves for me with their new guide information and the relations ship was a close and honest one. I even got the owner's Berra mitt signed by Yogi for h im.
It paid off big when the PIAS owner discoverd a warehouse find of about 100 bats, H&Bs all in the H&B boxes, unpacked, mostly Little League sizes but plenty of Mantles and Maris bats in the mix. He figured out a price for me that was still a swell bargain and he doubled his investment.
It pays, or at least for me it did, to make friends with and open an honest relationship with the owners and managers of these stores.