Pay for your inventory.

[Silverbane]

Trust me I know because just 1 hours worth of effort is enough to fill a 20 slot retainer.

And how fast do you think, say, 20 HQ Artisan offhands would sell? It's bad business to massively invest in slow-moving inventory, and that's a lot of Sealant, that is, a lot of gil, to have tied up.

Not everyone wants to sell mass quantities of cheap items. There's plenty of fun and profit in expensice stuff.