What I was saying, though, was that a cool idea might be to code it so that certain shoppies want certain TYPES of weapons more than others. To rehash the Thorne example, suppose the army's running out of hammers, and he wants more. If someone then sells something to Thorne, he might say something along the lines of that he wants hammers. Or whips. Whatever.

Allow items to move fast in-game. They shouldn't be dependent on PCs to move, because more "people" live in the towns than just the PCs, apparently. Otherwise, you've just got a bunch of non-interactive mobiles. This allows you to give the shopkeepers money every so often an item might move. Allow it to be checked as a percentage every hour or so that the shop is open that an item might move. Obviously some stores (the major cities) are going to move stuff quicker than the smaller cities, so up the probability percentage. This would make for a faster economy, and wouldn't make the economy necessarily grind to a halt when people don't want to buy useless item X that the shoppie's just bought.