| I've been to Houston Camera Exchange several times. Last time was by the end of July and they had a pretty good inventory of Pentax gear, but their prices were high enough to discourage anyone into buying something. This pricing policy from HCE (on Pentax stuff) has been the same for the past years and to be honest, they don't give a rats ass about Pentax. They rely on N and C stuff to make their business.
In fact, last July when I went there (just to have a memory card burned into a CD) I overheard a salesman on the phone, talking to some customer that apparently asked about Pentax, and the salesperson literally said: "Forget it, the Nikon D40 is light years ahead of any Pentax stuff...."
Don't know how true is this that Hoya is demanding a certain amount of minumum purchases for dealers or resellers, but to me, it sounds like a lot of BS. The last thing Hoya wants is to get rid of established distribution channels. Besides, if there were other big photo outlets in Houston that carried pentax gear, I would presume Hoya (Pentax) would try to encourage sales increase, but since HCE is the only big camera store in this big city, I am almost sure this situation comes from an inner decision at HCE rather than anything coming from Pentax (Hoya).
Robert B |