The place where I work is a lighting distributor focused mainly on selling bulbs, fixtures, ballasts, etc., to local businesses; although we also have a fairly important sideline in marine lighting for the barge industry, mainly for the Midwest and Gulf Coast. We're open to the public, but we're not exactly set up to best serve your residential lighting needs. Most of our fixtures are the sort of utilitarian stuff you wouldn't want in your dining room. We have plenty of bulbs that you might use in your home, but it'd be a lot easier for you to choose them from the shelf at the hardware store, rather than have us slowly comb through our ancient order entry/inventory system, to see if we might have what you’re looking for. Or just get something from the internet. Plus, we don’t sell wire, conduit, or boxes, and we have very little in the way of switches.
So it puzzles me that we have at least a couple of home-owners every week that want to stand at the counter for 15 minutes, or half-an-hour, and in many cases, they end up just having us order something they could have gotten faster, easier, and possibly cheaper online. Which is great for us. But it puzzles me.
All that being said, we can be a great resource, if you need to replace that odd-ball fluorescent bulb that lives under your kitchen cabinets. Or if you need an HID for your yard light, or just something no one else has locally. We have plenty of obscure stuff in the warehouse. It’s just curious to me that so many home-owners come to us.
Some are people who don’t know a “candle-opera” base from a FS-2 starter, and they need our expertise. Some of them are well-to-do gentry, who I suspect are too good to buy their lighting supplies at Home Depot, with the unwashed. I guess some of them just trust us more than the internet, so I guess I should be glad about that.