Should FLGS have Edition Bias?

[haakon1]

I didn't catch the entire conversation . . . The guy in the FLGS that was helping them pretty much went straight for Pathfinder and tried to sell that to them, going into the strengths of the game, the changes they made from 3.5 and how it was such an improvement, yada yada yada. He barely talked about 4E, only mentioning that he'd tried it for a few months and lost interest in running it.
. . .
I think that a better approach might have been to discuss the benefits of both systems, ask the customers what they liked about 3.5 and what they were looking for in a current game and then tout the pros/cons of each of the systems.

Since you didn't hear the beginning of the conversation and don't know the backstory on their previous conversations, you don't know the context. If it had been me or most of my gaming friends, it would have been something like this: "I still play 3.5 and 4e grates on my nerves. Do you have anything for me to buy?" To which the natural answers would be, "Hey, look at this Pathfinder stuff, it's fairly compatible" or, if the game store is trying to upsell by moving some core rules, "Hey, have you thought about moving to Pathfinder? It's a lot like 3.5e, only improved in X, Y, and Z ways, and there's always new stuff for it." You might have just caught the tail end of that conversation.