Ah, prices.
I used to have a very good and knowledgeable local dealer perhaps two hundred yards away from my studio. He sold Nikon, Leica and Hasselblad amongst other brands, and really knew his cameras and lenses.
One day, I walked in to buy something and he told me he was sorry, he couldn't sell it to me: Hasselblad and he had parted company because he was unable to source from Hasselblad at the prices the bigger London dealerships could sell to the public.
There is something more than a little smelly in relationships where dealer A can buy the same product from the maker at a lower price than can dealer B. Smelly, and a bit stupid: both dealers are in a position to sell the same product, and if the larger dealer can sell more cheaply due to his internal efficiency controls, great, but no manufacturer should be in the position to play kingmaker, and effectively decide which dealers will prosper and which die. Stupid, yes, because that product would have sold anyway, and therefore the prejudiced dealer/maker relationship has only served to reduce the maker's profit margin and the possible outlet opportunities.
For the buyer, it means fewer local shops hold anything - if they even exist - mine vanished. This was all years before the Internet; such madness, taken as the norm today, is not really a product of Internet shopping changes, it's a product of stupidity, fear, greed and semi-thuggery that started a long time ago.
Some say the buyer benefits; I don't think so. If anything, he becomes victim of the shrinking value of everything to all the participants on the way to the final sale. Maybe this is why the customer has also become the unwitting QC department post the purchase event. Stretch anything too thinly and it'll snap, one way or the other.
Rob