Its like the electronics stores of yesteryear. Any piece of equipment you ask about, regardless of how expensive it might be, will be met with the response "this is a great x, why I have one myself and it is just fantastic".
This. I clearly remember the day my mental default switched from "trusting sales people" to "ignoring sales people". It was the day my mom was trying to buy a two-line phone, and she had three sales people trying to tell the three different things that she actually wanted ("this cordless phone has two handsets", "this phone has a flash button", "one phone can't have two lines, you need two phones").
It shouldn’t be the case that reading up on something for twenty minutes before going to the store makes me much more knowledgeable about that something than the salesperson.
The only time in recent years I can remember when someone could actually tell me something I didn’t know was when I was buying glasses†.
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† It was a spontaneous decision, so I didn’t read up on it beforehand but I did some reading afterwards and was utterly confused. There doesn’t seem to be much good information about glasses on the web.
Those days are long gone. The big box store killed commission-based salespeople, now you have "sales associate" which really just means associates making 8-10 dollars per hour and are there to look helpful and run the cash register occassionally. Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, those types of stores do not train their employees on the products at all (except a tiny bit on whatever item they are pushing for the season).
If I was buying a ladle on amazon, I'd maybe check the reviews (by force of habit if nothing else). But I'd feel silly asking about pros and cons of ladles at the store.
And the physical store has no reviews!