OK folks, here's a view from the other side of the counter.
A guy walks in with a piece of a broken plastic car part and says "I need one of these." I ask what it's off of and he looks at me like i'm brain dead and says "a rc car dude." "OK" I say "what kind of car" again with the look "a street car dude." "What kind of street car?" I ask. With the brain dead look in full effect he says "a red one dude." With as straight a face as i can manage, I tell him as far as i know the red cars have been discontinued, but if he will go to ?????'s place across town he might be able to help since they carry a lot of parts for discontinued cars. After he leaves I call the shop I sent him to and tell them to be ready.

If you think the people behind the counter will lie to you, try being on the other side. I can't tell you how many times i've seen a nitro engine with the anodizing cooked off the head from running hot, while the owner, (who's trying to get a free replacement) swears it's never been over 180 degrees. A guy bought a savage one saturday morning and before closing the same day brought it back bent up really bad. Imagine a big letter C with wheels on both ends. He said he wanted his money back because all he did was bump a mailbox post while breaking in his engine. I've seen new ESC's with enough solder on the wire mounts to do 10 cars and motors with enough dirt in them to grow potatoes, all brought in by people wanting to know what's wrong with their cars. I've seen everything from brake fluid to salad oil in shocks and diffs filled with paint, lard, and epoxy, and no, the idea was not to make a homemade locker. Most of these people swear they don't know what the problem is when they bring thses messes in. I can only guess the bad RC elves are working overtime on these cars since most of the owners will tell you they don't know how these things happened.
Of all the things I see though, the hands down saddest is most of the problems newbies have with RTR's is failure to read the instructions even after being told at least a dozen times to do so BEFORE they do anything else. What's even sadder is most want the shop to pay for their sloth.

Please don't get me wrong, I always visit shops when I go to out of town and out of state races and my experience has been that if a shop has a track or supports one, the staff usually has a lot on the ball. It's the mall based, mega chains that have been the place I usually find morons behind the counters.