all in all, unfortunately, most shops lack quality, stock and diversity. i am fully aware that this is because it's just so damn expensive to run a record store, and you have to respond to the tastes of the customers or else you go out of business. in the US, this has meant we have fewer and fewer stores, whereas in the UK, there are a lot more stores, but whose stock is generally less diverse.

what i love best is a shop like mental groove in geneva, now deceased sonic groove in new york, or dead-as-nails atlas in london...lots of different stuff, almost all of it good, helpful staff, and a big back catalog.
for sheer weirdness, kim's video in nyc is great...where else can you get multiple volumes of cambodian psychedelic rock collections from the 1970s?

to borrow an idea from another thread, i think that a lot of people making techno would really benefit from contact with music from outside techno. in my opinion--shared by some but not all posters on BOA--techno has become too self-referential. i think mark is right about shaking things up a bit, and is right to criticize overspecialization in record stores.