Earl P.L. Apfelbaum opened for business full time in 1930 in downtown Philadelphia. He began his business during the Great Depression and started by selling out of his own stamp collection. His business and his stock grew and grew, and by 1950, the Apfelbaum stamp firm had opened a large office on South Penn Square, opposite Philadelphia's city hall in which we had one of the largest retail stamp stores in the United States. There were thousands of books of stamps neatly arranged by country and Scott number in the price range of 25 cents to several hundred dollars per item. There were hundreds of boxes of individually priced covers arranged by country. Clients from around the world would stop in and spend an afternoon or even a few days. Once a German fellow came in while on vacation and was so enamored of the thousands of items that he could peruse that he sent the rest of his family back to Berlin and stayed for over a week.

 
The economics of the stamp business changed, and we closed our stamp shop in 1981. There were several reasons for this. First, the INTERPHIL international stamp show had been in Philadelphia in 1976. It had drawn tens of thousands of worldwide collectors to our city and they had badly depleted our stock. Visits that would have been spread out over a decade were all made in a few short weeks. No complaints; we did a ton of business, but volume in our store never got back to earlier levels, and we started to emphasize more our auction and direct sale business as those areas of the stamp business have a lower inventory to volume ratio. Second, the stamp market, which had been so hot in the 1970s, cooled considerably in the 1980s. Before the Great Recession, which we are in now, the Reagan Recession of the early 1980s was the worst that this country had seen in fifty years. And with interest rates above 14%, we scrambled to find cash. Selling off our retail stock seemed to be the most logical decision. And third, the accelerating process of mail buying (and now Internet buying) began to fully take hold. People didn't want to travel to find items for their hobby, and stamp shows and philatelic retail stores around the country languished. Collectors really have never been better off; today they can find tens of millions of stamps and covers online. At the period of our largest retail stock, my Grandfather estimated we only had a million different items for sale.