When I said “all a store can offer is service” it means demo’ing audio equipment, and offering easy trade-ins and easier returns.
And I’ve run audio stores myself. Yes, they can run them anyway they like, they just won’t be successful or profitable by insulting or ignoring customers. Which a lot of people on this thread have clearly said have happened to them.
As an example, walk into a high end watch/Rolex store or other high end jewelry store, if they treated you like dirt or refused to show you a watch or diamond ring, what would you do? You’d walk out, you know you would. Why give audio stores a bye?
Also, Being helpful and useful is not knuckle dragging. I find firemen, doctors and garbage men helpful and useful and I expect those groups and others to be so. So yet again somebody tries to turn an interesting discussion into a stupid and very useless political insult. Stay on topic. The topic is audio stores and how they are run, nothing to do with liberals or conservatives.