I don't doubt that a good part of it is a chicken and egg situation, but I DO lean towards your thought that the ignorance on the part of sales staff isn't helping.
I didn't bring this up in my original post this morning, but found myself rereading my post this afternoon and had another thought:
Getting back to the responsibility of managers and supervisors to enable their sales staff to have at least a passing knowledge of related technology, isn't it funny that in a store such as Circuit City, you have sales staff in one corner likely touting a player that is SACD and/or DVD-Audio capable and yet, a customer that hears of those features and walks over to the music department won't be able to find a disc... and possibly be told by a staff member over there that they've never even heard of them?
With the tiny margins some of these stores face, you'd think that if they set up a rack of some discs in the equipment section and energize a few buyers, a reasonable number of them would not only buy the $150 universal DVD player, but also $50 worth of discs to take home with it!
The left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing; yet they work alongside each other under the same management. That's just sloppy and scary!
