To preface what I say. I work in a home theater department at a big box retailer. I am a 22 year old college student and have been in this hobby for a little over a year. From the consumer side of things in the town that I live only has a couple of hifi stores. When I recently wanted to purchase an amplifier I decided to stop by one of the local dealers. The salesperson treated me as if I was if I was wasting their time. Granted that at the time there was not anyone else in the store and I was really interested in purchasing one of the amplifiers that they were selling. It was like pulling teeth trying to get a demo of said amplifier. Needless to say that they will not ever get my business and I spent $3300 on the amplifier elsewhere. This was my experience and I think that the lesson to be learned is for salespeople to get excited about what they are selling. If you do not want to demo the equipment that you sell, then why bother to work there. It is obviously not that person's calling in life so they should find what that is. I understand that there are a lot of people that just want to waste time. There are tons of people like that coming to see retailers every day. However, the one or two that actually want to purchase something that they will enjoy make working worth while. The other thing is when you go to some of these retailers you have about a fifty-fifty shot of finding someone that really cares and gets excited about what they are doing. The problem with a lot of retailers is that most of the employees are kids like myself that are putting themselves through college and they really do not know or care about what it is that they are selling, it is more or less just another college job as opposed to a career. (As a college job though, it is a lot of fun showing people what they can get for a little more money than an HTIB). Does it approach the sonic realism that most of us has with most of our systems? Probably not, but it is enjoyable to give somebody a good demo of what a decent system sounds like. With that being said the reason I got into this hobby is that someone showed me an incredible demo of a 2-channel system that gave me that "I have to have that" feeling. Hopefully, when I graduate in May and get a "career" I will be able to find a shop that has a salesperson that is as enthusiastic about this hobby as we all are.
