Yeah. At best, most I've been to over the past couple decades seem to have roving cashiers that went through a program about how to be irritatingly salesy and might know where a specific thing was in their department. Sears was barely better than K-Mart in its death throes after the CEO decided to embrace the Hunger Games organizational strategy.

As I remember it, Sears was basically gutted by its CEO, Eddie Lampert, for his own personal profit at the expense of the company.

From what I read, he theorized that internal competition was the only way to incentivize efficiency rather than being propped up by the rest of the company. Essentially, made each division compete for funding, which naturally lead to undermining and backstabbing— for example, the retail division started undercutting Kenmore with other brands— and eventually it all collapsed.

Lampert failed at the personal profiting part big time:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/business/sears-edward-lam...

Probably one of the worst business moves in the 2000s.

Growing up there was a outdoors/sports store called Galyans where every department was staffed by people who actually participated in that activity. It was an amazing experience both because you were buying equipment from someone who actually knew what you needed and because talking to them was a great way to, for lack of a better term, start getting encultured into the community built around the hobby you were starting.

REI in the US is sort of like that.

> talking to them was a great way to, for lack of a better term, start getting encultured into the community

The normal term is "acculturated".