I guess stores in America realized, the bargain bins encourage people to look for good deals instead of just going in and buying whatever.

I don't usually buy guys without knowing what they are, so I don't think so. That said, I found a copy of The Temple of Elemental Evil for 2E, and a Tales of Monkey Island for 4E, both in said bargain bin. Oh, and a Spellforce Universe box also for 2E (ok, this one was kind of a blind buy).

PC bargain bins were dead (at least in my area) when I started my PC gaming career. The only exception was the bottom shelf at GameStop, which was usually just full of those "5,000,000 Games" compilation discs.

The same copy of XIII sat on that bottom shelf for four years before I finally bought the poor, battered, torn up box for $5. It was one of my best purchases.

Yes... I see. I admit I only read the first sentence of the OP before posting. Now that I've read it fully...

There was an adventure game I found for five bucks called Jack the Ripper. It felt like it was probably made in a couple of months on a really low budget. It wasn't really a good game... At all. It was rushed, a lot of things were broken, there were really annoying triggers you had to find to progress through the game, the ending pissed me off...
But despite all that, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It had good atmosphere, some good horror, and an fun and interesting mystery to solve. I ended up playing it three times, and reminiscing about it makes me want to find the disc and install it again.

I still see them.

Where?

I think bargain bin hunters have always been a minority (or at least, the smaller source of revenue).

Keeping the space for the new titles and removing the bargain bin was definitely the result of a shift in stores where less shelf space would be dedicated to PC games which forced the bargain bin for PC games out as shelf space for new games has always been higher priority then the bargain bin when forced to pick between the two.

Something in the retail landscape just changed.

What I wonder is which came first, the chicken or the egg,

Did online distribution like Steam, Gamesgate, GOG, DotEmu & al., force retail to go more with consoles because they wouldn't go digital as fast or did retail go with consoles more for other reasons and in doing so opened up the door wider for digital distribution on the PC?

I mean, consoles have been huge for a while, but there was a deliberate shift in the last decade where more stores that previously specialize in PC products (including games) when ballistic on consoles for the gaming department.

I'm not complaining, I prefer digital distribution (although digital distribution ala GOG or DotEmu), but I'm curious as to the causes for the shift.

Something that I can definitely see contributing would have been the fact that the price of console games doesn't/didn't decrease as fast as the price for PC games which would make console games more reliable long term shelf estate.

Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop....

Most Americans I've met who played games were console gamers so I'm pretty sure retail stores started making more room for console games because that's what most of their customers are looking for.

I found my all time favorite game in a bargain bin, having never heard of it before. Not even in a gaming store, small supermarket had a bunch of games as their weekly special of random cheap stuff. Something like 5€ for a trading game with some city building, not too much combat but a lot of management sailing around medieval europe. Was over a decade ago and I still play Patrician 3 regularly.

But it put the bar for random bargain finds impossibly high.

A few months ago I found Splatterhouse (for PS3) for about 8 bucks. Worth every penny (not to mention that the game was getting pretty hard to find).

A game from Steam's Bargain Bin (Sorry for mentioning the competition) Space Trader: Merchant Marine Has given me hours of fun (75 accourding To Steam). It's an FPS/ Economics sim ware you buy low and sell high. It's easy, but can sometimes offer challenge, has very nice graphics for a game made on the Quake 2 engine, a quirky sense of humour, enjoyably strange physics (You never talk fall damage) and a chilled out sound-track.
I play it when talking on Skype because like Duke 3D and Torchlight (My other favourite Skype games) It requires almost no attention to play.

It's shovelware and I love it.

(And it's currently on sale for less than £1)

I'm not sure it's the entire story.

I mean, I think consoles always had the lion's share of the market since NES came around when I was 6.

Yet, there were plenty of stores selling PC games.

Then all of a sudden, ALL of those stores started specilizing in console games and shrank their PC section to a limited selection of new full priced titles. The PC bargain bin went totally extinct in my area in the span of a few years.

I'm thinking the push couldn't have come entirely from the desires of the customer base. There must have been other considerations.

Yep. I bought the original Age of Wonders from a bargain bin, way back in the days of yore. Quickly became a favorite, which I've spent 100's of hours on, both playing and making maps.

I also bought Wizardry 8 originally from a bargain bin, the original Call of Duty (when the series was actually good), Medieval: Total War, and a game pack with Gothic 3 in it (And Dungeon Lords, but that surprise was the opposite of the thread's title).