You missed out mentioning the cost of ink and paper. Also the time taken selling a license is time taken away from selling tackle or doing some other service at the store. Sort of a double cost really.
If someone has a computer to be able to discuss this topic online, they should just be purchasing their license at home also. Great sites like this one have all the links to be able to do so.
--If the store only exists to sell me something then I may as well not go there.
--I can go on line and purchase not only my license but the gear as well. Don't have to worry about the store not having what I want.
--The biggest edge a specialty store has over on line and big box is customer service. If they don't want to "waste time" on service they may as well pack up.
--They have to create customers. Get people interested in fishing...then sales will come.
--Now that I'm getting wound up into a full RANT.... remember when you had to purchase your license and it had to be filled out by hand...how long did that take.
--Also if anything was not filled in right...had to track down the person and get a new one issued. The government punishement for license not filled out right was to charge the store for the highest value license. That is to say if I sold a license to a senior for $5 bucks and I hadn't ticked the box indicating senior I had to pay the government the price of a regular license.
--They also had a clerk that would review every license for errors and if there were to many errors you could lose the privilege of selling licenses.
--With paper copies we had to order them each month to ensure we had enough on hand as they wouldn't just send us a full box... One of the reason was again if we lost any or could not account for some (they had serial numbers)... again we would be charged the maximum that a license could be sold for.
--I used to really tick customers off if we ran out of licenses near the end of the month and they had to go elsewhere.
--PS... I purchase my license on line as I can't stand the whining from the store owner that is giving so much back to the fishing community.