Visited a Store and was shunned

As a late comer bucket list audiophile, my first audio store introduced me to great Sonics in GoldenEar Triton speakers with Parasound electronics. BUT at the second audio store, was a hard sell salesman pushing hard for a budget which as a newbie I had no clue yet. So I just said 10k so he showed me a system that sounded meh. After that, I didn’t trust dealers anymore so I built my first system piece by piece from deep researching reviews in TAS, Stereophile, and online reviews.

When I was close to being done with my audio chains, I found a trustful dealer whom I could trust - Christopher Thornton at Artisan Fidelity which I purchased tonearms and IC.  At AXPONA 2022, I loved the sound of the Vimberg Mino D but it was way out of budget, especially with the 9k diamond tweeter upgrade. Upon telling Christopher, he called the dealer to negotiate a lower price. A bit of back and forth as I raised my budget as they lowered the price so now I’m a proud owner of these wonderful speakers. 

name the store.
at the bare minimum, name the store.
it does us no good otherwise. 

Everybody's correct on this one.  Customers should be treated better, but then the customer demography has changed so radically.  It's a run and gun world where the old rules do not necessarily apply in either direction.

A friend who ran a store for 27 years shared that customers, with advent of more internet access, would be auditioning while simultaneously on their cellphones scouting product, price, dealer.  On occasion they would flip the phone and show Amazon or some other dealer's price.  Boom!  

It's a mail order bride culture.  See it, click it, wait for it.  Boom!  Bride in 2 hours delivery.

It's a disconnect that's been coming for a while.  "Faster, faster, the lights are turning red".

All the talk about consumers wasting the time of the B&M retailer is valid, yet one question that does arise is this: If one is a B&M retailer and is not suppling a higher level of service or perhaps product exposure, then why is the consumer expected to pay more for the product? 

Unfortunately, in this day and age, consumers are looking for the best price, and while they may be willing to pay more for additional service or future assistance, they are not likely to pay more just because the retailer has a B&M store with a bunch of commissioned sales people. 

There's only one or two hifi stores in my city and the main one has the rudest employees---I've given them the benefit of the doubt before and would try and go back to check things out. Each time, rudeness. So, needless to say, I've never bought anything from them. I have driven about 95 miles to another brick and mortar and was treated like a real customer and have purchased quite a few items from them. They'll get my business every time. Sorry you had to go through that.