When I first started buying vintage knives at the flea market, I had a few prearranged stops: people who would regularly find knives and liked dealing with me, and I liked dealing with them, too. Otherwise, I would walk around asking the sellers if they had any knives. In the early days from 2005 to 2008, it was common for people to say, “No, but I do have some cook knives”. Most people asking around for knives at 6 am back then were looking for old military, pocket, and hunting knives. Culinary knives were considered chaff, often sold for $1 to $5 because they were deemed to have little value beyond utilitarian use. Within about 5 to 8 years, it seems one of these dealers heard from someone that a Sabatier sold for $100 online, and after that, every Sabatier became worth $100, and in the eyes of many, every chef' knife became a Sabatier. Deceased people whose families had no interest in their stuff and people who didn’t pony up on their storage unit bills started having fewer and fewer good knives in their stuff, and eventually, the volume of good culinary knives made their way less and less to the market. This is the short version of my small microcosm as seen from a Bay Area perspective; maybe it's different elsewhere, but this is my experience.