I went around to every single store on this island (Aland Islands in between the butt cheeks of Sweden and Finland) and asked if they had any plans to invest in airguns, none of them did because the market is so small. They could order a few brands of airguns but selection wasn't good and the airguns on display were 5-10 years old and simply hadn't sold.
This is why I expanded my company to start offering airguns. I believe I can offer the largest selection of brands compared to every store in Finland.
The only brands I can not offer (sure, there are probably obscure brands out there I've never heard of but
I can offer airguns from most on this list) atm is Huben and Edgun as I can not afford their 50 rifle minimum and I don't know of any distributors who offers single rifle purchases of these brands.
What I want to do is not stock a ton of rifles but offer as wide a selection as possible, I also want to have 1x of most models as I intend to launch a airgun "review" channel this year. I'm not doing this to make money, I would make minecraft videos if I wanted to do that. I want to combine my hobbies into one and at the same time provide a "service" that I hope will pay for itself.
When it comes to stores you are almost always disappointed on this island, the selection is never good for niche items. I have gone to different stores hundreds of times and asked for certain things only to be told they don't stock them. You can generally find everything you need to survive here but special purpose built items are generally not stocked because it doesn't sell. You want a graphics card? Sure there are 3-4 to choose from in each store but if you want a specific one you've read a good review about you have to order online. If you ask the store to order it for you it will be 30-40% more expensive than if you buy it online. As this is an island everything is more expensive, think it was around 20% more expensive than mainland Finland for most items last time a survey was done.
Stores are good for impulse buying, you walk in and a sales person might try to convince you that this item is the best in the world. You buy it and then find out it's not a perfect fit for you. I really dislike this and no longer trust the people in the store as I have noticed that for the things I'm interested in I usually have more knowledge than the people in the store and thus know when they are lying to me.
Buying online has become annoying though, you can never trust any reviews anymore as they are all click bait garbage and reviews posted by so called buyers aren't reliable either. If an item has 50 5star reviews and zero of any other rating it's probably fake reviews. The best you can do is hope to find some tech channel that does "proper" reviews and hope they aren't paid and bought. A good indicator is if they have not been sent early copies and they are a big channel with say over 100k subscribers. This usually means companies with garbage products don't want people to find out at launch as it takes honest reviewers a few days/weeks to properly test a product.
TLDR:
Shopping in a store is annoying because if you didn't go there for a specific item a sales person will try to convince you to buy something you don't actually need or want.
Shopping online is annoying because you can't trust reviews on the sellers site but have to go trough random product reviews you hope will be honest with you.
I would hope for a future with several Ai reviewers who do proper reviews of products and are honest about it but the future is looking dark as every single Ai chatbot is programmed to lie. We are about to see a ai review war between ai programmed to praise products as gods gift to man vs ones programmed in the other direction. The serious ones in the middle will struggle as people won't know what to believe and all these bots will have access to everything about you so they will know exactly what to tell you to get you to buy the product...
But then again...
