Complacency mentality amongst some buyers enables price gouging amongst some sellers at both a retail and private sale level.
There are still plenty of bargains to be found out there hiding away in barns/garages or sitting onsite barely used whose operator is some octogenarian that can barely remember what machines he still has.
I didn't want to pay retail on barely shopped container pins so imported my own load and did my own labour on them to resell to new entrants where I had surplus stock. I didn't want to pay local retail on NIB Sterns so bypassed the local monopoly distributor and imported my own units with a bunch of other fellow collectors as a group buy. This goes on regularly down here in Australia largely on the quiet because of the hierarchical politics and market collusion.
The key is, it is going to take some legwork, initiative and going outside of the traditional collector group rather than some button clicking and playing pinball musical chairs with the existing userbase (where everyone ultimately always misses out bar one).