This is actually quite sad to me. As much as I complained about Circuit City and Best Buy with their pushy salesmen and incredibly high prices, there's always a benefit to being able to go to a store and see what you're about to buy. You can't tell the build quality of a laptop by reading an Amazon description. You can't tell the picture quality of a screen by the customer reviews. You can't do side-by-side comparisons with a product in each hand.

I really like the Sears model. My hometown wasn't big enough to have its own Sears store, but they had a catalog front-end, where they stocked one unit of their best selling products so people could see them in person. If you liked it, they would order one to be shipped to you or to their store, and you could pick it up. We need tech stores like this, an Amazon front-end.