Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with price shopping as long as you are comparing apples to apples. This is about using services from business X where one isn't going to buy in order to facilitate a purchase from business Y that keeps its prices low by not offering the services that the shopper felt he/she needed to take advantage of at business X.
This is really simple in spite of all the rationalization and strawment posited in at attempt to muddy the water.
If you don't use or want the services that LGS's provide then it doesn't make sense to pay their prices.
If you DO use/want the services that LGS's provide then it makes sense to pay LGS prices.
That doesn't mean blindly paying any price any LGS asks, but it does mean comparing apples to apples--comparing LGS prices to other LGS prices, not comparing LGS prices to prices charged by businesses that don't provide the services that LGS's do.
I am sorry but having a gun behind the counter for sale does not equal a service. It is the part of their business model. IF they are smart it is only part of their business model. If it is their business model they will not survive very long in todays market.
What you see as a "service" is nothing more than the traditional retail "push" model. It is not the "interweb" or not having a local retail location that makes the "newer" gun stores more price efficient it is the fact they use a "pull" or just in time inventory model. The avg LGS has to bring in inventory for you to look at because they don't know any other way to sell things. They are dinosaurs in terms of the rest of the retail world. You call that a "service" I call it their necessity because that is all they got.
I will use Bud's as an example. They are about 1.5 hours up the road from me. They have a huge internet presence but also have a retail store. They hold a fair amount of inventory in the store at the same prices you find on their site. If its not instock they pull it from the distributor to the store for you to pick up. They use both approaches in order to satisfy different types of customers and serve a larger geographic area something any LGS store could do but few understand.
Look at people like Top Gun Supply, PSA etc... They get it. They do both as a result they are rewarded by the market. Nothing but the vision and desire to do it prevents any LGS from doing the same.
The failure of most of the LGS I have encountered is that they do not know how to run a store using any other method other than the "push" model. They are not tuned into enough about the trends that are actually moving and the inventory reflects it. They also lack the marketing and sales knowledge which is needed to create markets within their local markets.
They do not leverage the internet, social media or hobbyist board like this one. They simply sit in their store "pull" inventory in and try to push it out. I can go to the 5 or so LGS in my small town every week and see 90% of the same inventory sitting on the shelves week after week. The majority never moves.