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CapnAmerica: I run a third-generation manufacturing business with my brother. I can appreciate what you're saying. Add to that everything associated with keeping seventy employees happy, including Uncle Sam, and I'll gladly go the LHS route. . . . However, my cardinal rule is not to make my hobby my business. It may work for some folk but not for this guy. So - perhaps I mispoke when I said that I wouldn't mind running a LHS. I ran (not owned) a camera/card/hobby shop back in the late seventies. Perhaps I spoke out of nostalgia but there are days that I sure wish I was back at the old camera/hobby shop. BTW, the Camera and Card shops ( there were about a half dozen of them in and around the Pittsburgh, PA area) gradually closed in the eighties. Fortunately for me I moved on before they closed their doors. Hallmark went the route of setting up their own stores. We never handled anything in the Nikon line but sold some mainstream Canon, Minolta, Mamiya cameras. We're talking the kind of stuff you see in today's X-mart store - maybe a little higher/mid range. I started out as a "hobby boy". We sold the usual wood and plastic kits, slot cars, train sets, and rockets - stuff that was popular at that time. The highest end train stuff that we carried would be the AHM/Rivarossi locos. My dad took me to the C&C shops back in the sixties. Our first layout was built with stuff from those stores. He also took me to *THE* LHS that had all the nifty brass and anything-else-you-could-imagine stuff. I'm happy to say that I take my son there now and the owner that waited on us when I was little is still there to wait on us today. The store has grown through the years but has probably passed it's peak. I don't know if the son has quite the wherewithall that the old man has to keep it going. Nothing against his son really - it's just that the climate has gotten a whole lot different. Cheers, -slim
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