Business Sense?

Today I went to the Roncegno for the annual Chestnut Festival. It was very similar to last year, but the stalls I really wanted to see weren't there -- into each life a little rain must fall. Last year there was one particular antique stand that had some vintage postcards of the Trentino region. The cards were in plastics sleeves in a notebook. Scott started to flip through the book and the guy said something to us, which I didn't really understand. Scott started to look again and the guy finally said "no touch." We both felt a bit scolded and it put a bit of a damper on the afternoon. We both thought he was lacking a bit of business sense, and manners, as he didn't offer to show us the cards, and didn't seem to have an interest in selling the cards.
The incident brought to mind another experience we had with an "astute" business man. Once when we were living in Missouri we stopped into a used record store in Sedalia. This was in the early 90's when most of these stores were starting to go through a crisis. There were several huge used record stores near the Westport area in Kansas City. At this point they didn't seem to realize that the days of vinyl were ending. The prices were still high and there were no customers. The shop in Sedalia didn't have quite the same air of desperation, but it did have its own peculiarities.
We spent time looking through the racks and picked out several we were interested in. The records weren't priced so the owner spent the next ten minutes or so flipping through the pricing guides. During this time, we were treated to many diatribes. One of which had to to with sales tax. He didn't want to have to deal with prices that weren't round numbers so he spent time figuring out the price minus the tax. Everything was priced with very unround numbers so he would have a magically even number after tax was added. I wondered why he just didn't post a sign that the price included tax, and just take it off his bottom line at the end of the month. He proceeded to list all the albums at the highest "blue-book" value. When he would come across one not in his books, he'd make sure to give it a high price anyway. Scott had picked out an old record of some obscure jazz trumpeter. Scott had no idea who the guy was, but he likes jazz and if the price was right he would have bought it just out of curiosity. The proprietor fixed his long-haired, bearded visage at Scott and began to quiz him about why he'd picked out this particular album, and suggested perhaps Scott had some special knowledge and was trying to screw him out of a vast vinyl fortune. He priced the album at the princely sum of $9.43. We left empty handed.
Our friend in Roncegno reminded me of our music mogul in Sedalia. When it was apparent that most of the booths were the same this year, down to the merchandise, a visit to our antique dealer was in order. There was a ton of people in the way, but I managed to hear him chastize a woman for trying to see if there was a postcard for Strigno in his book of Trentino postcards. When she explained this to him he told her she had to ask him to show her the pages, but as he was busy with someone else she would just have to wait. She walked away without looking back. Another satisfied customer.