It seems to me like the standards of customer service at gun shops are slipping, which is odd considering ammunition costs more than I can ever remember it costing so pretty much any purchase from a gun shop involves the sort of money that would be treated as a welcome sale at nearly any other small business (or large one, based on my time in retail many years ago).

I went into one gun shop the other week to enquire about some .22 ammo and the guy behind the counter answered the phone in mid-conversation without even as much as an "excuse me". Normally I would simply leave and take my business elsewhere, but there's just not a huge number of gun shops about in Australiaicon so it's not like buying a DVD player where there's probably half a dozen places in the same mall who can sell you one.

Even more disappointingly, when he finally got off the phone, he told me they didn't have the brand I wanted, wasn't sure when they were going to get some more, and couldn't tell me anything about the nearest potential equivalent. I left, disappointed.

I went to another gun shop a few days later, and while they did have what I wanted, the price was too high and the attitude felt like was that I was a nuisance for not buying an entire case of ammo. As the opportunity cost of going somewhere else (and maybe discovering they didn't have what I wanted either) was rapidly escalating beyond the worthwhile point, I begrudgingly brought what I came in for and departed.

This got me thinking, though, that treating your customers as a nuisance or not having any knowledge of your products would be unacceptable in any other industry, yet with gun shops it seems to be an increasingly common theme.

I appreciate times are tough for businesses, and in this part of the world they effectively have no competition, but even so - a smile and some kind words costs nothing; and I know I certainly drive a bit further and pay a bit more to business with shops I know will look after me and value my custom.

And I'm not even going to get into the skyrocketing cost of ammunition or the increasingly patchy supply of "common" cartridges, either...

I don't really want this to be a rant, but I am interested to know if my experiences in this regard lately are an outlier (maybe I just ran into two shopkeepers having a bad day) or whether it's a wider phenomenon.
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