Originally posted by Rondec Video killed the radio star?
Auto tune killed actual singers?
The reality is that as far as camera brands go, things have returned to the pre-digital boom that hit ILCs. People who just wanted to take snap shots of their kids do it with their phones and those who are more serious still gravitate to ILCs. As far as camera stores dying, they have been hurt by a number of things, including internet sales. It was hard for them to compete with B and H and Adorama and Amazon on price, particularly if those companies weren't charging sales tax. At the same time, a lot of them, like Ritz weren't offering any particular level of customer support or service that attracted folks to come in as compared to just buying on the web.
A lot of things happened concurrently. There was no one big thing that took out camera stores. Internet sales had been around since long before the internet. When I was looking at buying my first camera in 1973, there was a Hong Kong company called T.M Chan that sent out a delicious little catalogue that was printed on rice paper and had delightfully bad English. The mail order camera business in New York wasn't even open when I saw my first T.M Chan catalog. B&H came along in 1973, Adorama was 1977.
I can't speak for the USA, but camera gear mail order in Canada was pretty much non existent until the internet came along. I ordered a few things from New York pre internet, and I recall the pusher that I habitated complained a bit about getting undercut by the New York houses 20 years ago, but for the most part, most people shopped local.
What started the demise of camera stores here, and I suspect this will hold true most places, was the rise of minilabs in grocery stores. All of a sudden you had mega stores that sold pretty much everything using one hour photo finishing as a loss leader ruse to get people in the door. The plan was to get them to drop off their film, wait in the store and shop for an hour (hopefully buying more than they needed out of sheer boredom), picking up their prints and leaving.
This had a serious effect on the bottom line of camera stores who had been dependent on photofinishing as their bread and butter. The average P&S user wasn't quality driven enough to care all that much if the camera store lab had better technicians and was hopefully putting out a better product, they were price driven, plain and simple.
Over a fairly short period of time camera stores started to fail, and the knowledgeable people who worked for them were either in the wind or went to work for the companies that had killed their previous employers. I went from working in full service wholesale labs to a camera store one hour lab to a Walmart photo center.
Digital pretty much killed that business. These places still have dry print kiosks, but they are staffed by the people who work in the electronics department who periodically go over and put a new paper or dye sub roll onto a printer and go back to selling cheap home electronics.
There is a lot of cause and effect at play, for example, camera stores not being able to attract good people had to do with failing revenues.
Mail order sales were little more than a mosquito bite to brick and mortar stores, anyone who didn't buy specialty magazines such as Popular Photography or Shutterbug wouldn't have a clue that Adorama existed.
Then the internet came along and everything changed in the retail market. The New York houses were able to get their names out there, along came Amazon, etc. Brick and Mortar stores weren't able to prepare for this fast enough. The New York houses had mail order supply chains already, morphing from mail order to internet sales was a fairly easy transition.
Brick and mortar operations that depended on foot traffic got caught by a tsunami that they simply weren't able to prepare for before it hit.