I remember working in music retail in the early 90s, around the time when most 'singles' were taken away from retail floor space. We migrated to some cassette singles, and some CD singles, but the selection went from decent to dismal in just a few months - and in most stores in my area, not just our mall location. I was told "demand is down" by some regional bigwig, but people kept coming in asking for a single of some song on the radio they'd heard, and all we had was full CDs. These just happened to be discounted (for the first few weeks of a song's radio release) to make the price more palatable, but it felt shady to me.