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Old 01-21-2015, 08:50 AM
Ltvscout Ltvscout is offline
Ye Olde Rocket Shoppe
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Milwaukee, WI
Posts: 6,474
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kurtschachner
There were three (I think) Happy Hobby stores in the Milwaukee area at one time but one burned down a while back. In the early '90s when I got back into rocketry they had a bunch of OOP stuff including some Centuri kits. The prices were reasonable at that time but then when they found out someone wanted the stuff, they increased the prices to almost insane levels.

The one that burned down had this guy running it that seemed to be stuck in a '70s time warp. Pink Floyd posters were around and the whole atmosphere just added to the weirdness. I haven't been in the other two in quite a while simply because there was nothing in those stores I wanted, especially at the prices they offered. The one up on the north side had this woman working there who was interesting. She once yelled at me because I was wanting to buy something that was buried a bit on a shelf, and she loudly complained about "people always wanting stuff" or some similar comment. The third store had a guy running it with his large German Shepherd dog that patrolled the store. The dog was never aggressive to me but still it was a surprise seeing it silently walk between the aisles.

Heh, I experienced the German Shepherd at that store myself, weird. The store in West Allis that burned down a few years ago had some halfway decent prices on OOP stuff initially when I got back into things in the late 90's compared to the other two stores which were already jacked up. I remember they had a bunch of old catalogs from various years stacked up against a wall that were free for the taking, so I did. I grabbed handfuls of each year they had. ;-) I would say the store on 76th and Good Hope is the dumpiest of them all. I always felt like I might fall through the floor there. They had some gems hidden if you dug a bit.

Model Empire had the best/cheapest assortment of OOP kits when I became a BAR in the late 90's. Buying OOP kits there at original catalog prices helped fund my habit with all the kits I sold on the old, original Ye Olde Rocket Auction. That original auction was all done by hand with me making manual updates to the web pages as I or others put items up for auction and as people emailed their bids in to me. Ah, those were the days...
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