I can relate to shop owners/workers not wanting people to flex sticks from personal experience. There's a difference between feeling a stick out and flexing it with your body weight and muscle. I was showing my teammate a new two piece xn10 that I had just bought when he started doing all this flexing and bending to the shaft, eventually cracking the blade near the insertion point. I wanted to smack him, but I just took it back and didn't say anything. Luckily I could just replace the blade on that stick, but I imagine that similar damage could occur on a one piece. There's a difference between getting the feel for a stick and doing the kind of flexing that some people do. When you're using a stick during a game you put a lot of pressure on it for a very short period of time, milliseconds really...whereas someone like my teammate was practically bouncing up and down on the shaft and putting sustained pressure on it, the stick isn't designed for that.