choices, choices

I wish physical shops had reacted against the ease and convenience of internet-purchasing by becoming less variously effusive, recalcitrant, threatening, patronising, ill-informed, loquacious or surly as appropriate to their type, staff and nature of business. Some of them are even worse now. I always feel vaguely guilty about having to use them to poke and prod at things in order to assess the quality or suitability of something I then intend to buy cheaper online but always try and talk myself out of this sensation when shops act in a way as to discourage even a simple visit to check prices and availability. It's getting really difficult to be able to just pop into somewhere and browse undisturbed, though I have yet to take the decisive step of wearing a sandwich board stating "I'm just browsing: I do not wish to be descended upon by smarming salespeople and will leave if so approached; I am not about to steal anything and will leave if watched too intently; if I have a question I will seek out a staff and ask them" and instead have to play shopkeep-bingo where they don't leave you alone if you want rid of them and bugger off to deal with other people when you need to ask them something that their poor product-tagging fails to explain. I once emailed a shop to tell them that I'd just bought something online rather than from them purely because their staff were complete fucking pillocks but that was a fairly extreme case. Then again, shops might benefit (especially at the moment) from being informed of their failings at capturing the limited sales opportunities available. Jessops might be glad to know that they discourage customers from ordering items which aren't in stock by offering information to the customer to confirm (rather than confirming it when the customer supplies it) in clear breach of the data protection act. Electronics shops should publish full product specifications next to all their products rather than attempt to make them up when questioned, resulting in immediate withdrawal to the far more informative internet. Shops selling items of clotheswear should group things by the type of people likely to buy them so that people don't have to worry that someone was thinking they were looking at a rail of hideously impractical fashion-draperies rather than merely attempting to find a pair of simple trousers with enough space to permit comfortable walking and their staff should SHUT UP and STAY AWAY. We do, after all, pay their wages. If they behave. It was more lack of product-variety than staff-annoyance which lost a physical shop a sale this evening (that and the fact that they had been shut for most of the five hours I spent looking and attempting to make a decision) but their lack of extensive product specification and review and a slight overbearingness of staff did them no favours. Per-hap I shall tell them this, though politely. And anonymously.