SteveR750:Well not everyone wants to spend £1000+ on a separates hi fi system, but there are enough people out there offering free demos in their own living rooms and making it work. Get the price right, and aim it at mid / high end stuff and it's possible to make it viable - in any case you don't know till you've tried.
Agreed it's debatable whethere everyone after budget kit would be willing to spend extra, but personally if I was spending upwards of £1k on a piece of kit, I'd want to use all of the possible options in my own house before parting with my cash. Just avoiding the pain in the aris drive into suburbia would be worth it.
Like I said Steve, a few of us would, but the majority of people are price driven - it doesn't matter how much service you give to people, no matter how low you drop the price, and it doesn't matter how much free cable you throw at them, people still want more. It's human nature, unavoidable. The amount of people that would be happy to do what you say would be an extremely small minority. If something can be exploited, people will exploit it. Once word gets out that a retailer is lending their stuff out willy nilly, you're a sitting duck. It's bad enough even without offering that. You wouldn't believe what people try (and sometimes do) get away with. There's only so many losses a company can take before the whole scheme is scrapped.
I'm not saying it definitely wouldn't work, but there are too many reasons why it wouldn't. Another reason is that if there's a hot product (let's say the SCM11's) and people are loaning for a week at a time, and you ring up today to borrow them, what would you do if I said you could have them for the 4th week of September? It'd be like Lovefilm with one copy of *insert name of mega popular film of the moment here*.
If someone is a one man band, they'll need the best products available at the price point that a customer is interested in. Either the customer gets to loan one or two oer week, or the demo is taken to the customer. If it's taken to the customer, and we assume the demo lasts the day, IF the customer decides to buy (and he's unlikely to pay top whack), the business owner would have to make enough on that sale to cover the days expenses (travel), enough to cover the business premises (as I said, you would HAVE to have a shop front to get these accounts), and he'd have to make enough to pay his mortgage/council tax/send the little squids to school/run a car etc etc. I really don't think it would be feasible.
I do agree that for many it would be easier than travelling to hear what they need to (one reason we try and keep the biggest range we can under one roof), but it would take years for it to become known well enough to become popular enough to make it pay.
I'm not trying to say that there's a divide where people after budget stuff want the best price and the higher end want service - there is no divide. People want the best service, best price, free installation, 24 hour phone back up service and as many freebies they can list on ebay as is humanly possible in one go at whatever price point they pay. I'm not trying to shoot the idea down in flames, I'm just trying to get across why it wouldn't work. Unless people have worked on 'my side of the counter', they don't really have an idea of what they're up against.
I'm sure that a real businessman would be able to come up with even better reasons. I'm not a businessman, so these are just observations I can see from that point of view.
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