I think the other thing with the "priced to sit" is that some people don't want to see something leave their collection.
I was in Cleveland and there's this amazing vintage store...games, toys, clothes, the lot. They had a Vectrex for $250. We ALMOST bought it, before some Googling determined how out of price that really was. This has been a few years ago, and the Vectrex was about $150 at the time.
We then head to a used game store that I had found online. We spent about $150 and that got us the Vectrex they had (at $50), plus a couple of Coleco SuperAction controllers ($2 each, they didn't know what they were and I recognized them), a light phaser for the Genesis, connectors and cables we had been missing, a bunch of N64 games, a couple Jaguar games, etc. Two huge bags of stuff, plus the Vectrex. Those guys seemed pretty sad when we told them we were just there for the weekend and it'd probably be a year before we'd be back. (Side note: The last time we were back in that store I scored the Japanese N64 version of Ocarina of Time for something like $12.)
The point of the story is that the vintage store needs to say that they have rare consoles and games...and the rare ones do not come in as often. If they price something rarer completely out of league, they can then keep that advertising going until something better comes in, then drop the price and make their profit. And if someone comes in willing to pay the exorbitant cost in the meantime, more profit for them.