Ethan, the deal with shops is that if you don't like the service you are getting that you can shop elsewhere.
So, as I said, it was your choice to go ahead and buy. You could have walked out and gone to a competitor. My guess is that you overruled your heart and went with your wallet. It felt wrong at the time, but you still went with price over service.
The rest of you can flame me if you want. I'm just telling it like I see it based on Ethan's previous posts. It's clear to me that he hasn't ever settled on gear that's actually right for his needs.
In the last 3 months he has flitted between the Sony STRDN 1030 and Onkyo TXNR616 and Cambridge Azur 650r and Pioneer VSX527 and Sony STR-DH820.... pauses for breath... and is now considering a Yamaha RA-X1020. Some of the above have been bought, tried and returned for various reasons. To start off with a £160 Pioneer and now be looking at a £1000 Yamaha screams "confused buyer" to me. It could be argued that a good salesman would do a consultative sell to establish needs and budget before moving on to a comprehensive dem to confirm the appropriate products have been short-listed. The problems with this though are multi-fold. Some of the main ones are:
- Doing this for an individual customer takes a lot of time and resources, and that has to be paid for from profit. A retailer can't afford to do this and sell at some of the lowest prices in the market. The maths doesn't add up.
- It's speculative. Even after spending all this time there's no guarantee of a sale. This is a big problem in a competitive market when a salesman is expected to hit revenue targets.
- Customers are sometimes not truly honest with themselves. Sticking rigidly to some arbitrary budget when it's clear that more needs to be spent to get the desired quality is never going to be a recipe for success.
Ethan also mentioned in
this thread about using DSR to return goods he had tried at home. As I pointed out, that's not something that DSR provides. So is it any wonder that restocking fees were mentioned.
So this brings us back to the main point which is choosing an appropriate retailer. Expecting a consultative sell and 2-3 hours in a dem room is just unrealistic from any high volume low margin retailer. I really do hope you get sorted Ethan. I think though that you need to go visit a proper AV retailer and recognise that their service has a real tangible value. Good luck.
