It's probably because I'm seeing more and more the problems it creates, like adiction to smartphones or unsecured gadgets with back doors (smartTVs, IoT devices, etc).
Back in those days, the price difference between stores and online/mail-order vendors was enormous. Mostly because the customer populations didn't overlap much, so they could get away with it. Also, the cost of shipping usually canceled out any cost/benefit with smaller items.
There was one crazy Packard Bell/AOL/Viewsonic rebate combo that was like $600. It had specific instructions that many people screwed up, and they were left with unreturnable (no bar code) crap gear. One guy got arrested for chaining himself to the bollards in front of the door in protest.
The amount of fraud these guys ran into was incredible too. We’d get raided by bus loads of Chinese people who would engage every employee while another crew cleaned out things like video cards and other small items. It was like a Viking raid. People would buy computers, print fake UPC/serial number stickers for rebates, strip the memory/disk and return them.
I don't know if all Best Buy locations were like this, but for seemingly every artist that was signed to a label, they had their full discography + singles with amazing b-sides + even imports from Japan (imports cost like $20 though). Just aisle after aisle, so much music to buy and making really hard decisions about what's going to fit in my budget.
It what's I imagine a candy store is to a 6 year old.
This was the 90s, though. The alternative was a CD player. MiniDisc was still a thing.
I remember when I got my first job, at age 14, in 1998. I cut, baled, loaded, hauled, and stacked hay in a barn for a local farmer. It was extremely hot and tiring work for an overweight geek, but it paid better than anything else I could have gotten at that age - I was paid by the bale and I want to say it worked out to about $6 / hour. I saved all summer with nothing in mind other than "I want to buy a cool tech gadget!"
At the end of that summer I convinced my grandfather to drive me ~90 miles to the nearest Best Buy, and walking in that day was the best feeling in the world - a whole store full of cool toys that I didn't have! I walked out that day with one of the first MP3 players, a Diamond Rio PMP300, and a 32MB SmartMedia card. I spent about $350 on them, which my family thought was absurd.
I proceeded to go home and fill it with songs I downloaded from UseNet, and took it to school. I went to a rural school, and I don't think anyone had a clue what it was - several people asked me if it was a MiniDisc player. I explained to them what an "MP3" was.
I wish I could recapture the feeling of walking into Best Buy in the 90s. These days I have pretty much every tech item I want, and there are very few things there that can hold my interest. It makes me a little bit sad to walk through the doors and not be excited about what I'll find. It's pretty much the very definition of a First World Problem, but it is what it is.
Back then, I wasn't really wanting "toys" as much as I was thirsting for knowledge and fields to explore. That little MP3 player introduced me to UseNet, then Napster, and finally Gnutella. It ended up being a pretty big part of what got me interested in technology in general and development in particular - I went from "Hey, this is cool, free music!" to "Hmm... LimeWire is open source, I wonder if I can figure out how to fix this bug..." over the few years following.
Ultimately, it led me to my career. I wouldn't quite go so far as to credit Best Buy with that, but it's fair to say that the store contributed a great deal to building my interest in a technology.