Hello and greeting from a fellow Detroiter!
I was in the same boat as you. The only store that I could find that had arrangers that was within reasonable distance from my house was the GC in Southfield. I went there and saw that at the time they only had Yamaha arrangers. They had T2, PSR3000 and PSR1500. Unfortunately, the conditions to try out these instruments were very poor. T2 was not even hooked up and the PSRs were placed on a very tall rack (not easy to try out). The day I went there they had a water leak and water was dripping from a ceiling on the keyboards . Did not try out Roland or a Korg until I took a trip to Europe earlier this year.
Went to the same GC yesterday and saw that they now have a Korg Pa 50 and the new S500 BTW.
All in all, from what I have seen in the mass-merchant music stores in US, arrangers are not given a high attention. I spoke to a manager from a GC and he mentioned that, in the Detroit region, some GCs are not even carrying arrangers because the "perceived" interest is very low. The manager however, seem to think that it is on the contrary. He especially though that the oriental arrangers would be a big hit since we have a large Middle-Eastern population here.
Best regards,
Bart

[This message has been edited by Barty (edited 07-23-2007).]