Hmm, why not make _all_ items claimable by some ridiculous combination,
merchant skill plus some 1.5 meg costing item (official document to law office
perhaps, cost 1.5m?) and this claim could be done to ONLY one person, and
after that its permanent == no further claims.

This way people could buy some worthwhile eq from sales and get the yyber-name
bonuses everyone is after but it'd cost 1.5m more, so it wouldn't be used to
every xari ring and slender

OR whatever cost you feel is adequate to compensate the fact you want to buy
something instead of waiting for eq-train to arrive, and yes, there are people
who simply cannot do time-consuming eq. (Now you say why they should be able
to get the items then - well, in general they don't, but I'd like to see the
high-cost eqs to be sold on decent price on sales again and this might just do
the trick