Admin changes not reflecting on front-end

[BlueOvalIndustr]

Okay so I'm at a loss here.  I have set up a staging site with 1.9.1 installed, and can't for the life of me get the product page looking the way I want it to.

All of my products were imported from the production store btw.

One of the problems I'm having is that the 'description' field has no line breaks on the front end.  Even if I use html </ br> tags and enable html in the attribute or category (can't remember where you turn that on) I'm still just getting a block of text.  This is a problem since our site uses bullet points for all of the products

[BlueOvalIndustr]

so i've found that by changing the store view in the top left drop-down box i can get the changes to appear on the front-end.  

it doesn't seem like I should have to do this every time I want to add or edit a product though, is there a problem with my structure or something?  When in 'Default Values' why won't my changes reflect on the front-end?