That is stil not unusual in many areas sadly, in fact in some American States they are even banned
Coincidently I just received an email today from a guy in Northern Ireland looking for some Chinese as he has never seen any in his country either.
It is sad that pet shops get away with charging more for different colours of Syrian too by giving them fancy names - Black Bear, Teddy, Panda, Dalmation etc are all just regular Syrians really. They are all directly descended from their wild cousins in Syria
You are lucky to have Winter Whites in your stores, they are something we don't see very often here in the UK widespread commercially available, but when they do appear in pet stores they are often just classed as Russian Hamsters and clumped together with Campbell's Russian Dwarves
