But it is that lack of face-to-face dealings that has led unscrupulous Internet companies to flourish.

Example:

Many of us like to take photos while hiking. We all want a good digital camera for those pix. We shop on one of those comparison sites and there's a retailer with a really great price for a camera. (Okay, it's too great.) We take the bait and don't just "get switched," we get whipped. We get bludgeoned.

Broadway Photo comes to mind. The ultimate, surviving -- and still prospering -- unscrupulous seller on the Internet. Or one of the dozen dba's they use. You can search one of those e-opinion sites and find at least one posting within the last 24 hours by someone who has just yesterday been fleeced by them. Every horror story begins inevitably with: "I bought camera-X online from Broadway Photo and was sent an email to call them to 'verify' my order" -- and the nightmare began.

Yet years after I first heard of them they continue to be the "valued merchant" or "trusted seller" (NOTHING, I swear, could be further from the truth) with the "most favorable reviews" by those same comparison sites, which often are truly nothing more than some guy with even less than a garage-full-of-stuff to sell, he's just got a computer and his comparison site that's getting income from the scam retailers.

Which leads to this:

Are there companies -- individuals, really -- out there who who have a great lightweight backpacking product but who haven't succumbed to selling on the Internet because they don't want to be tied to the computer or phone (as Sarbar said) and yet the rest of us don't know about them? I guess they'd be locals, since how else could you have heard of or dealt with them. I'd be interested to find out if there are.

I'm into boating also, and I can think of one -- a retailer, who sells certain marine things in my town for up to half what I'd pay for at the overpriced, Internet-savvy gorilla, West Marine. Figured there might be a few left in hiking stuff, too.

(As I've said before on this forum, we should give thanks that by the very nature of hiking, there are very FEW unscrupulous merchants and manufacturers we have to be wary of. But we still drive a car to a trailhead, take photos of our hike, take drugs to relieve the foot-pain of a long-mileage day -- alas, but we are not hiking in a vacuum.)