Visited a Store and was shunned

That’s kind of amazingly bad service, but I wonder if they are focused on installations?  

They tend to only want to deal with other building professionals. 

OTOH, now you know.  I had a similar experience buying my Audi.  Volvo offered a similar size/cost vehicle and the salesperson could simply barely be bothered to show me the car.  Audi was night/day difference.  I wasn't their "type." meaning mostly doctors and lawyers. 

I haven't been in a retail store in a long while, but I agree with those that say it is a courtesy (for them, for you) to call in advance. That said, you should not have been treated shabbily. The caliber of dealer has always varied greatly- Jim Smith once wrote about this- the small handful that "get it" are to be treasured. The market today is ever tougher-- and there are fewer dealers chasing a smaller segment of the public for the so-called "high end." Keep in mind too that in the human experience, you are going to encounter a range of people, from the passionate to the jaded, the helpful to the rude. Does make life interesting. 

My friend and I visited Audition Audio in Birmingham AL back in the 1980s.    We were treated well.  Pretty sure it was Jim Smith himself who helped us.  We both ended up buying a pair of Magnepans that day.  Best sounding Magnepan setup I have ever heard,  but not easy to reproduce at home.

And I know this sounds insane, but honestly the enthusiast Audio buyer is being squeezed out by the mega buck pure consumer.  

By this I mean, they don't want to investigate DAC chips, or speaker material, or think about horns vs. planars.  They want to buy a home theater system and be assured it's wroth the million dollars. 

Development money is tight, and in home theater for instance, having the funds to keep up with video/HDMI/audio and licensing issues is a very expensive proposition. 

I don't know this for sure, but my feelings are that Theta Digital ran into this, and tried for a while to bridge the consumer and installer markets, and finally gave up on the walk-in consumer.  I think other brands may have also.  Honestly I say this with very little evidence, so take this with a grain of salt.  I'd love to understand this whole marketting/dollar dynamic better. 

on a related note, I think Stereophile, TAS and the like probably spend more time thinking about those installers as their prime audience than we realize.