Video: Ars walks down to the local neighborhood drone store

BELLEVUE, Washington—A typical Ars Technica staffer's dream world includes brick-and-mortar stores that stock the kinds of techie errata you'd find in the lowest drop-box menus of an online retailer like Monoprice, with a spicy dash of SkyMall-level excess. You know, like an old Brookstone or Sharper Image store at the mall.

Such stores have decreased in popularity in the digital shopping era, but sometimes, copious user reviews and lengthy demonstration videos pale compared to the gold ol' fashioned feel of walking into a store, grabbing a remote control, and piloting a $679 drone at maximum speed into a concrete wall.

We did exactly that after visiting a Drones Plus shop at a strip mall near Seattle. The store is the upstart chain's eighth location in the continental United States; the chain also has locations in Hawaii, Vancouver, and Toronto, and they all sell drones ranging from a few bucks to a whopping $3,400.