In recent decades all sorts of competition has sprung up to compete with local stores. Long before the internet we saw "discount warehouses" such as Costco and Sams, where all the staff see are boxes piled high, and don't have a clue what's in them. But they can sell more cheaply, because they don't have the massive extra costs of employing knowledgeable and experienced staff. The internet is no different.
Since this trend started every specialist hi-fi shop in London, a massive city, has closed. There's now nowhere you can go to get informed advice and actually see and hear products (I say "nowhere", but one or two niche shops have appeared, all selling a very limited range and often sponsored by a single manufacturer). Camera shops have resisted a bit longer, largely because the manufacturers have supported them in refusing to honour "grey imports". Bike shops have largely gone, as someone said earlier. Scuba shops have greatly diminished, and now your "local" store may be a long drive away. There are now large areas of the UK where no shops remain, including near some prime diving sites, so it's impossible to buy air.
Perhaps it's most pronounced with bookshops. In Oxford, my old home town, there is an enormous bookshop called Blackwells. For my whole life they have been there, with massive stocks of books for you to browse, and staff composed entirely of people with higher degrees in the subject they are handling (there is no such thing there as a generic "shop assistant"). Yet shops like Borders opened up nearby, with very limited stocks of safe uncontroversial books, and sapped the bread-and-butter business. Blackwells are pretty cute and have fought back well, competing on the internet stage, but inevitably they've had to close several branches and cut back on stocking books they are unlikely to sell. The result is a shop that is still superb but has lost some of its magic. With the growth of Amazon the pressure on Blackwells is steadily increasing, and it may not be long before they can't afford to staff their shops with PhDs. Then we will all have lost. Many other bookshops, without the resources or knowhow of Blackwells have gone to the wall in the last 20-30 years, having survived in several cases for 100-200 years.
Back to dive gear. Did no-one spot what I said earlier about the quality of gear having dropped markedly over recent years? I've run a retail scuba gear shop for quite a few years and I can tell you it's something that became very apparent to me. I stopped selling Uwatec computers when the "dead-in-the-box" %age reached 50%. What do you do when your gear arrives, possibly a new design you're not familiar with, and so far as you can see it doesn't work but you're not quite sure whether that's so or why? Or it works but poorly, like most new regulators these days. Who's going to help you sort it out? If you're a member of an active dive club you may be able to give each other mutual support, but otherwise you're on your own - most dealers won't provide warranty work on gear purchased over the internet (or from "discount warehouses"), because those suppliers were paid by the manufacturer to check and sort out new gear but choose instead to use that money to give themselves a competitive advantage. They'll work on the gear, but at full retail rates.
Sometimes you'll be surprised by the result.
