I'll toss my thoughts also to this discussion about the difficulties of
getting merchant services. At the moment I don't really bother with fws and
prots but couple months a go at least getting those was a real problem.

The problem as I see it is that when customer wants to get merchant services
the potential merchant is doing something else and can't provide the services
at that time. Also for merchant it might not be worth their time to go and
serve just one customer.

To solve these problem I think that we could add somekind of a merchant
service module where customers could go and drop their items that need
something with a message stating the required services. Then when the merchant
has time he goes to the module gets the items and does his/her stuff with
them, return the items to the module and finally customer comes and collects
his stuff.

I think that the module should be addition to player cities but it could be
something similar to merchant cubes. Also the module could be operated by more
than one merchant and the operating merchants are visible to the customers.
The services would not be limited to only prots and fws but could also include
other merchant stuff like IDs, labels and so on.

My 2 pennies.