Fortunately this is just what happens because we live in a free market society. (Aside from this particular incident which needs to be fixed internally at Best) This is good for the businesses and good for consumers. Competition forces the businesses to tighten up their operations, and at some point competition on price becomes a non-issues since a perfectly competitive market returns zero economic profit, this just meaning that there can never be on retailer sustaining huge profits for a long period of time.
No what you get are a bunch of kite retailer trying to diferentiate on attribute such as quality, design, and service.
As someone new to this sport I originally tried to find kites on ebay, i tried to find the cheepest kites and the cheapest lessons.
I ended up going with a local instructor knowing that if I had questions of problems he would be around.
This holds true for my kite. I bought my kite locally through a store also, not associated with my instructor, and I did have many questions. The support and service the store has given me is way more valuable than the dollars I could have saved via ebay.
Over time this wil lall play out and in the end I think that if the local shop owners can sustain themselves long enough they will be ok.
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