I had loads of scores BITD from shops here and abroad.
I recall a holiday early 90's with my parents, a cruise and one port of call was a small Italian island. There must have been 7 shops in total there, and one was a toy shop - full of Matchbox Robotech stuff, Dinky and Corgi cars, He Man...no SW stuff here but I came away with a pristine boxed Dinky Klingon Cruiser, MOC Amy A Allen A Team figure and a handful of boxed Dinky cars.
On the same trip we stopped somewhere on the Spanish coast and I walked into a little gift shop, at the back was a small room with toys, including a HUGE original He Man shop display stocked to the rafters with MOC figures and vehicles. At the time He Man wasn't really that sought after so I left it but I did find a mint Spanish SW paint set which ended up in Jim Stevensons collection after I sold it to him.
Again, the same trip, another Spanish gift shop with an upstairs toy dept stocked almost exclusively with Geyper Man stuff! I almost filled a suitcase with what my dad called 'more crap'.
Shops around Stoke always had stuff if you looked hard enough, I'd stripped several shops of old stock when I used to trade. Got a call once from a shop owner who had several huge boxes of carded figures he wanted to shift - loads of last 17, tri logos, a real mix of stuff. I remember going through each box with my hands shaking!
Our local John Menzies used to be a little gold mine for stuff when they had sales, loads of old shop stock for pennies. The a toy shop in Burslem called Pleasure Treasures, a friend asked him if he had anything and he told us to come back in a week so he could sort some stuff out. We went back and went down to the cellar and were confronted with box after box after box of SW stuff - no carded figures but a huge bag of loose ones. We filled the car.
Those were the days...
