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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
11-10-2017, 08:15 AM
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I am trying to not make personal attacks.
As i said, we are free to agree to disagree.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
11-10-2017, 06:53 AM
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Those “idiot retailers” include Amazon and Bee and H Photo, both of whom have fired customers for abuse of privilege. It’s nice to know who you think are idiots.
I don’t know what you are doing wrong. I’ve had my local store bring in product and let me take it out for several says without charging my credit card. Your “5 minutes” and my experience don’t jive. This is probably because I’ve made the effort to develop a relationship with my local store based on mutual respect.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
11-08-2017, 09:23 AM
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Not necessarily.
As we've seen, people who abuse that privilege get fired by the online retailer. If you see abusing a retailer as your right and tolerating the delays inherent in online shopping as acceptable, I just don't know what to say.
So you don't see try before you buy as a meaningful service? You don't see being able to handle the equipment prior to purchase as a meaningful service?
Again, I just don't have an answer for that, especially when you have indicated that it is important earlier with your "try it for free" comment.
That's a pretty wide brush that you are using to tar the retail sector with. Are you sure you are on the right side of the facts? My experience has been exactly the opposite of yours.
Apparently you don't see building relationships as important. I've been a loyal customer to a particular camera shop for well in excess of 20 years, and a Pentax camera user for somewhat over 30 years. What that loyalty has bought me is getting to try out new equipment before it's released to the market, having equipment brought in "on spec" so that I can try it out as part of my purchasing decision (you would be using the "buy it and abuse the retailer" option), and I've had my local camera store go to bat for me several times with suppliers when my needs have exceeded normal customer service expectations.
None of this is available through mail order, it is only available when you build a face to face relationship with people, and give them the same respect you think you deserve. It's not what you get with a faceless web store whose customer relations only extends to a "thank you for your order" email.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
11-07-2017, 06:41 PM
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That would be an outlier, nothing more.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
11-02-2017, 09:47 AM
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I suspect the reason why Well's is still going has more to do with the mentality of the population of Moose Jaw than anything else. They have an almost backwards attitude regarding supporting local businesses, something that is missing in larger population centers.
Regina is down to two stores as well, though I think the Bird Films store is little more than a photo kiosk beside a senior's complex. They closed their Golden Mile location a few years back, which was sad because they were one of the very first tenants. That leaves us with Don's Photo, which filed for creditor protection last year. Don's is, effectively, a dead man walking. Back when I was in that game, we had a store called the Photo Center. They were very good, but eventually their business was sufficiently eroded by a combination of cherry pickers such as Astral Photo and mail order stores like B and H that they had to shut down.
It's easy to say that a store goes away by dropping the ball, but when literally hundreds of stores of a particular kind go, it's hard to make that argument fly. The full service stores that catered to everything photographic got killed by cherry pickers, and those cherry pickers eventually got killed by places like SuperStore, who were able to underwrite really low margins by selling loaves of bread as a good mark up.
When I was playing the camera sales game 30 years ago, Superstore was selling cameras for about 5% below my cost price. People would go into a full service store for information, and then go to a grocery store to make the purchase. I recall one day I spent half an hour going over an EOS 650 with a guy who went away to "think about it". He thought about it on his drive to the grocery store, apparently, because a few hours later he came in with his new camera still in yellow bags to get more information.
When enough people will shop elsewhere to save a few dollars on a thousand dollar purchase, and you can't drop your price more than you already have, it doesn't matter what your service levels are, you are going to go out of business. This doesn't just apply to camera stores. Look around at what big box retailers have done in every sector of the marketplace. How many specialty electronics shops have closed since Best Buy opened? How many local hardware stores have closed since Home Depot came to town? The list is pretty long, and I don't think it's fair to say that every one of those thousands of proprietors had a bad business plan or dropped the ball. The simple fact is, a small business cannot go up against a category killer with deeper pockets.
When you are a small business, and you are up against a megacorp who advertises that he doesn't care what your price is, he will beat it by 10%, you are going to be in for a very rough ride.
We had a store called "The Photo Lab" here in the late 1980s. All he did was process film. He made the mistake of getting SuperStore's attention, and all of a sudden we had a price war on our hands and the cost to process a roll of film dropped to a couple of dollars. Good for the consumer? Perhaps in the short term, but in the long term, it took out a few small businesses, limiting choice even more in a category that had it's choices eroded quite a bit already.
Sure, it's just business, but it is an example of how capitalism hurts us all. The logical conclusion of capitalism is one giant megacorp, something that is ultimately very bad for consumers. Unfortunately, consumers are too blinkered to figure this out. A lot of the posts I read on this website are testament to that willful shortsightedness.
---------- Post added 11-02-17 at 11:35 AM ----------
I did. The last time I checked, Mississauga was part of Greater Toronto, with a population of close to 6 million. Would you please stop deliberately misinterpreting my posts.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
11-02-2017, 08:25 AM
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Henry's has a very successful internet business model. They are one of the rarities that has managed to keep a storefront presence. I suspect they are not making much off the storefronts though. It's more about visibility. They also have the advantage of being in a metropolis that comprises some 20% of the population of Canada. When your customer base is 6 million people, it's easier to find enough customers than when your base is a quarter million. Note that they haven't ventured to open a store in Moose Jaw, for example.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
10-12-2017, 03:29 PM
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Then why does the OP sound like a victim😁?
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
10-12-2017, 10:22 AM
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They offered a service. That was 30 years ago. It wasn't good enough. People decided they would rather have no service and save a few pennies. Now that they don't offer a service people complain.
You can't have it both ways, the choice was made for you decades ago. At this point Elvis has left the building and he isn't going to be singing any more love songs.
---------- Post added 10-12-17 at 11:26 AM ----------
Apparently you and a few others think this started happening last week.
I have some bad news for you, it started happening decades ago. What you are moaning about is the culmination of years of people ignoring the local camera store in favour of a very slight cost saving.
I sold cameras at the retail level all the way through the 1980s. I was there, I watched it happen.
Where were you?
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
10-12-2017, 08:31 AM
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Camera stores have been dying for several decades. People would rather play mail order roulette in the hopes of saving a few dollars than support local businesses.
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