Dealers Using Odd Catalog Values At Show Bourse

I've been at the Westpex show for a couple of days and am generally enjoying it. I don't have a lot of experience shopping st show bourses - I've been mainly interested in auctions, exhibits and meetings/seminars at the few shows I've been to, with some shopping around, but not much. A couple of the dealers I've encountered here are showing catalog values for stamps that are way off current Scott values, uniformly on the high side. Even after their "discount from catalog", I would have been paying more than current cat value for many of their stamps.

What are others' experience in these situations - are they just using out-of-date values because they can't realistically keep all of their listings up to date or just continue to use old catalogs, or are they playing games? I'm enjoying the show overall - just luck of the draw I guess that I happen to encounter these particular dealers here that I have not dealt with before and therefore have no basis on which to evaluate what they're doing.

Thanks for any insights.

Playing games, but the knowledgeable buyer protects themselves by bringing their own catalog or borrowing the dealer's to check.

You should name the dealers. I was at Westpex yesterday and return today.

It may not be an issue you want to address but if I were you, and if I went back there and saw this again I'd ask the dealer about it. In a nice polite way, being careful not to infer any wrongdoing. Act innocent, see what he says. If nothing else it'd be interesting.

I've run across this too. A lot of show dealers have boxes with 50% or so off marked prices. Many times I've had a dealer try to charge me the full amount. Then it's 'whoops, sorry'. Yeah, sure.

Two points of interest to the original poster 1} That tells you there are still people buying based on catalog value who buy from show dealers. 2} If any dealer is using old catalogs for pricing it goes to say 1/2 of prices should be lower and 1/2 using higher price, they can't all be higher ,then someone is playing games and being selective to the higher price .

OP, you don't state what the material is you are looking at. It could be Michel, Stanley Gibbons, Yvert, Facit, etc., converted from the native currency to U.S. dollars. This almost universally will result in inflated retail prices. For all the complaints I hear about Scott values, the inflation pales compared to Stanley Gibbons and Michel which are sometimes incredibly overstated, at least with respect to what material brings here in the U.S.

Additionally, for U.S. material, there are dealers who use Brookman rather than Scott for their pricing, which will result in higher values listed, depending on the material.

I was looking at.US postage dues and ducks. As suggested, I went back this morning to one dealer and inquired as politely as I could. He bestowed an angry wave-off and proceeded to ignore me as long as I was there. So much for that. Another dealer did mention using Brookman, so presumably that would help explain. I prefer not to name names because apparently there may be a number of reasons why discrepancies exist other than nefarious intent. As has been stated, best strategy is to be a knowledgeable buyer. I was just curious as to what others have experienced at shows.

One of the dealers that I bought from at WESTPEX yesterday uses Brookman, and his file cards explicitly state "Brook. C.V." I have the 2016 Scott CVs on my shopping list for U.S. stamps, and the CV was the same for the item I bought from him (CV was $37.50, dealer's price was $21).