I'm sure we all have our favorite snake oil story...

Mine comes from Lyric HiFi here in New York, when they tried to sell me
little coin size metallic stickers. At $250.00 each, they supposedly
improved the sound by "dampening the field-effect resonance" on your
individual components. What??? I could hardly contain my laughter!

Then there was the afternoon at Sound by Singer (a more appropriate
name for this rug merchant would be 'Sound by Swindler'), where he had
a customer convinced his prospective $500,000.00 system was so precise,
that one could actually distinguish between two identically titled CD's
- by the subtle differences on the pitted surface of the disk.

I'm not even going to start sharing what salesmen have said while
trying to sell me cables...

A_C