Plasma TV shopping

It's been quite a while since I've posted any updates, but yesterday I had an experience that seems sort of "post worthy", so here goes:
After all of the other updates to the home control and home entertainment systems necessitated by the lightning strike, the main home theater display began to show its age. The Sony KP-61HS10 is about 12 years old now and still works OK (and is now up for sale, BTW), but the lack of HDMI inputs and the pseudo 16x9 display just really doesn't fit after modernizing the other stuff. So, I went on a quest to slay and drag home a spiffy new plasma display. My Internet research told me that Panasonic was the way to go and my budget told me that the "GT" version of the 65-inch diagonal panel would be my best choice. I had seen many advertisements from H.H. Gregg for the Panasonic plasma sets at what appeared to be reasonable asking prices, so Tami and I took a trip.
We arrived about 7:45 PM and wandered around the store for a while, but never found the P65GT30 that I wanted, only some similar but less featureful sets. Tami noted that the display was not really crisp on several of them and I noted some noise artifacts as well. About half of the displays were running a basketball game, others were running canned demos, and still others were running BluRay content, so direct comparisons were next to impossible. Then I noticed that all of the "house" distribution of video content was via analog component signals, not HDMI! So we were looking at $2000+ plasma, LCD and LED backlit LCD panels in a very expensive piece of real estate with several staff members running around and they hadn't even bothered to configure the displays so that you could see their best performance! Calibrations were all over the map as well, but that was expected. Just to add a bit of insult to the process, not a one of those staff members said so much as "Hello" to me. Disgusted, I left and went to BestBuy, just across the street.
Same thing again: the displays were disorganized and placed sort of randomly throughout the TV area, calibrations varied wildly, some weren't even priced or identified. This store is also situated on some premium real estate and heavily staffed, but again no one other than the greeter at the front door had anything to say to me. Perhaps one of them might have walked up and said, "Hi, I see that you have $2500 about to burn a hole in your pocket. I'd like to help you with that!", all of which was true. I really do prefer to buy locally and let my tax dollars support my local economy, but not when it's this hard.
I have a true appreciation for the difficulty and costs of operating a retail business and I'm sure the owners of these stores have a much sharper view of these costs than I do. Why in the world would a business spend so much money on a storefront, advertising, salaries, utilities and the like and then fail to execute when a customer walks in with cash in their pocket!!!!!
Perhaps the business model for these "big box" stores depends on screwing the customers on overpriced warranties and computer service that a high school kid could perform. Perhaps the margin on a $2000+ television is so slim as to not make it worth the time of yet another kid making $10 an hour. Who knows?
Please comment your experiences, particularly if you're the owner of one of these fine establishments. I'd love to hear from you!