Originally posted by monochrome I thought it was interesting he also said they had to let a dealer go that didn't agree with the pricing strategy.
Pure speculation - In St. Louis at Creve Couer Camera (9 stores, and apparently the largest B&M Dealer now that Wolf/Ritz is gone) I don't see new Pentax items any more - just ageing, unsold stock. I'm not saying there is any connection, but I was shocked to see their apparent loss of a distribution. CCC has been around since the late 70's and always featured Pentax - even ran co-op Pentax radio and TV ads as recently as three years ago.
The founding family sold the company recently. My guess is the buyer needs cash flow to service debt, not profit margin. If that's true and Ricoh Dealer financing terms don't let a Dealer scrape a small slice off high volume financed by the manufacturer then it makes more sense.
In a way I wonder whether a Dealer really has any skin in the game at all.
You may have something there. Retail financing is a huge risk for all parties since there have been so many changes in this field. Some of the small and maybe not so small businesses that have failed may have done so because of refusals to change methods. Some businesses, especially online retailers, hold no stock at all and are just an outlet for direct ships from the supplier.
Of course we'll never really know all of the details of business failures or dropping of certain lines. Cord Camera based out of Columbus, Ohio had 20-30 stores five years ago and closed the last store early this year, here's a story from the
Columbus Dispatch:
The only remaining Cord Camera store, at 1132 W. 5th Ave., is scheduled to close on Wednesday. The once-thriving local chain fell victim to changing technology and the proliferation of digital cameras and smartphones.
“This is no longer a profitable industry,” said A.C. Strip, the attorney for Colfax Financial, owner of Cord Camera. “Camera stores have gone the way of Kodak and Polaroid and manual typewriters.”
At its peak, Cord Camera had more than 30 shops in Ohio and Indiana.
Cord closed six of its eight remaining stores in January. The Westerville store on Schrock Road closed last week. The company will not file for bankruptcy protection, Strip said.
“We hung on and hung on, but this is no longer an industry,” he said, adding that few people buy rolls of film or have them processed at stores such as Cord.
“We were competing with the big-box stores and Amazon (for equipment sales), and they sold the same cameras for the same price.”
The remaining inventory at the Cord Camera on W. 5th has been on sale the past several days, and the price cuts will increase as the closing approaches, Strip said.
Cord Camera was founded in 1954 as Fast Photo Service by Cushman “Jick” Cordle. His son, Steven, became president after his father retired. Steven Cordle died in April 2012.
Colfax Financial, a local venture-capital company, purchased Cord Camera in 2009.
“It was all about service to the client and custom lab work, and that work just diminished,” Strip said.
Midwest Photo Exchange is one of the few camera stores still in business. It offers specialized services to amateur and professional photographers, owner Moishe Appelbaum said.
The store, at 3313 N. High St., no longer processes film.
“It’s no longer about shifting boxes across the counter. It’s about taking care of the customer,” Appelbaum said.
The store’s employees offer expert advice on camera purchases, and Midwest recently opened a learning studio that offers photography-related classes. The store also sells printers that customers use to print the digital photos they take.
“The quality of these printers is good, and they’re cheaper now, so it makes sense and is a lot of fun,” Appelbaum said.
It's interesting because the owner of Midwest Photo has changed his store with the times where CORD did not. CORD continued to base it's business on film processing, and selling point and shoot cameras and in most stores carried the same DSLRs and few lenses as the Big Box stores carry. Midwest has a booming business of Professional Video equipment, lighting, rentals, upper level DSLRs and lenses, medium format, etc, just about everything but Pentax until they started carrying the 645z. You can find just about any photography related item in the store, and the employees are photographers.