On 07/22/10 12:08, David Sadowski wrote:
The whole nature of retail has changed, but if you think about it, that has been happening for a long time. In the early 60s, when I was a kid, I used to hang out at the old neighborhood camera store. A large percentage of their business was in home movies. That market died, seemingly years before video came on the scene. Dr. Land got forced out at Polaroid after the Polavision debacle... this was instant home movies of very low quality. An idea whose time has never come. When I started going downtown, there were camera stores galore, including Altman Camera, the Noah's ark of camera stores. They had two of everything made, one to show and one to go. Then, Altman's employees formed a union, and he shut down the place rather than be told what to do. I worked in camera stores and photo labs for many years, starting around the time of the Canon AE-1. It used to be a service business. Someone would come in the store and you might talk to them for an hour. But you were meanwhile trying to educate them as well as load them up with stuff. Sales people got "spiffs" for selling the most stuff. It used to be a service business, but now it's a price business. Everybody talks about how they want service, but what they really want is the lowest price. It got to the point where they would pick your brain for an hour and then leave the store to go buy the item across the street where it was cheaper. Then there's volume. Money talks, and when a company can purchase in bulk, they get a better price and can pass that along to the consumer. Photographic items are commodities... the item is the same in all stores, it doesn't matter where you buy it. Now you're expected to take the thing out of the box and figure out how to use it in seconds. Photography has been democratized and is now open to practically everyone. This was not true in the past, but it's part of a trend going back to the beginning of photography. The mom and pop camera store is largely dead and a thing of the past. The amateur photo lab, also dead. The big box store and the Internet has taken over. Some people don't like the democratization of photography and the effect the Internet has had, as this has lowered the value of photographs generally. "MWAD" (Mom With a Digital) has become a pejorative. Now that half the cell phones have cameras built in, there are more people on the street with a camera at hand than at any time in history.
I worked in a camera store for some time but moved on in the 70s. You are basically correct.It was always difficult to know what to do with customers that didn't understand Kant's first imperative. Ironically, it was some of those that purchased Polaroid cameras at big box stores and then couldn't buy accessories or film. The strangest thing was people that realized that if they went and purchased a camera at a big box store that they would have a problem getting service at our store. So, they wanted us to sell it to them at the same price. They didn't realize that considering our overhead that we were probably making less on it than the bid box store.
I don't know what will happen to the photography business. I have noticed that hardware stores seem to have no problem competing with the big box stores (although there will probably be less of them) except that, many have been shooting themselves in the foot by being only Ace or TruValue. They don't have the selection and they have a lot of private label merchandise -- they are in danger of becoming mini-big box stores.
I do know that we carried a lot of stuff that big box stores would never carry. And, we had already decided that there was little money in carrying Kodak armature products. I do wonder where professional photographers shop.
I can't find accessories that I need, so my only option appears to be to order then from a camera store in Germany. You would think that on line retailers would have everything, but perhaps some of them don't realize that they could charge more for hard to find items.
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