Very interesting move by amazon. No doubt the retaliation will be political in nature and focus on the unfairness of no sales tax, well the retaliation is alrea

Very interesting move by amazon. No doubt the retaliation will be political in nature and focus on the unfairness of no sales tax, well the retaliation is already underway and lobbyists have been hired and working on this issue for some years now. I have always had a paper notebook I carry around with me. Sometimes I will be shopping for something and the local store will have many models but none on display and almost no information about features. Let's take BluRay players for example. The local store has about 30 models of these. A couple are on display but not plugged in. What is really important to me is the player not take 5 minutes to cue the movie because the processor is underpowered and the DRM on BluRay uses a complex scheme involving Java code and decrypting. I also want to know how the menus are arranged, because most remotes are infuriating to use and user interface is important. You would think this would be an ideal situation for brick and mortar because knowledgable sales clerks would be able to answer my questions and allow me to test the merchandise using the large screen TVs they have set up for the purpose. Alas, no. The era of sales clerks knowing accurate information about products ended many years ago. Such places can not be found. The era of being allowed to test things in store has likewise ended. So what I do is write down the model names of a half dozen of the most likely candidates and then go read online reviews to find if there are complaints about cuing speed. Finding out about the menu design is nearly impossible though unless I can find a pdf manual to download that comprehensively documents the menu structure (seldom the case). Having found the best product, I return to the brick and mortar store and purchase the item. What happens sometimes in these endeavors is a manager comes up to me and accuses me of being a "price checker" for the competition. He will tell me that the license that governs my entry to the store prohibits this and that I am now banned from the store and police will be called in the future. I assure him I am not a competitor's price checker, I am trying to get information about the product since his own people don't know anything. He is not interested. I am now banned from the store. So then I buy from amazon. If the product sucks I return it. This is an inefficient process, I would much rather buy locally but local merchants aren't hearing of it.