It is not just in England that the gun dealers are rude, here in Australia the very large majority are like that. There are a few shops that are pleasant to deal with but the majority are rude and arrogant. Trying to get them to order something that is not on their shelf ready for immediate sale is extremely difficult. Asking questions on a product you might be interested in buying generally is answered with "I wouldn't know mate" and that is it. They don't try and find out for you, they just stand there.
But best of all is trying to get a gun shop to send photos of a gun that you might be interested in buying online. They will have one photo and when you ring up and ask for some more photos they are always stunned and a bit annoyed that you should ask, and never have any on hand. Then you get the usual spiel about how they can't do it themselves, only their mate can do it and he is away or won't be in for a week and on it goes. Then when you ask them to send the sort of photos that that they would like to see if they themselves were buying a gun online, one dealer actually said to me he would never buy a gun online even though was happy to sell them online. Then he told me everybody trusts him and a verbal description was enough. When he finally sent some other photos, the gun in question was in poor condition and had been heavily and poorly modified, but you could not tell from the one photo he had. You could be sure that trying to get your money back if you had bought of him online would be a non event.The rest of them send you ten pictures of exactly the same view. I have bought about fifteen guns online, with much pain and suffering,and only one dealer was friendly and had more pictures of good quality, ready to go. Imagine trying to sell a car or house online without at least ten photos
Unfortunately, as a dealers license is difficult to obtain, they basically have a captive market. There are only so many shops and if they are all rude and apathetic then you don't have a choice and end up buying from them anyway because of convenience. I run my own small business and I know if I treated customers that way I wouldn't have many left.
Some of you may have noticed that my last couple of replies have been mainly whinging, however I am constantly amazed at how poorly a lot of businesses treat their customers but still make plenty of money.
Anyway, I better go now, There are customers knocking on the door.