[rollei_list] Re: Ritz Camera in Chapter 11

 
On Tuesday, February 24, 2009, at 11:41AM, "David Sadowski" 
<dsadowski@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Laurence Cuffe <cuffe@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Ritz charged me $11 for a roll of 120 develop only, Walmart charge $2:80. 
>>  When your looking at forty rolls from your summer road trip:-it was an easy 
>> call. I wish them well and hope they can get some one in with some business 
>> sense.
>
>You've missed the point.  It's not an issue of mismanagement or a lack
>of "business sense" on Ritz's part.  It's an impossible situation they
>are in.
Well in this particular shop I was not impressed by the quality of their 
business sense.  They couldn't give me a price for a box of 10x8 paper which 
they had in the middle if their shop window, just tell me that it wasn't 
selling.  I would have been prepared to pay double to avoid using Walmart, but 
not four times the price. I also patronized another local photo-finisher, but 
stopped when the combination of nostalgia for the old days on the part of the 
staff combined with dust on my negatives and film cut mid-frame or on the 
diagonal so as to get the cut through the image area of both adjacent frames 
started to get me down.  There was one other place that developed 120 for me in 
Waterbury, but they just disappeared one winter. They were good, and not afraid 
to tell me that my exposure was crap when it was.
All the best
Larry Cuffe

>
>Camera stores used to make a small profit from selling you a camera,
>and a much bigger profit from the photofinishing.  Well, guess what?
>Both markets are disappearing from places like Ritz.
>
>Cameras today are commodities and the consumer does not care where
>they buy them, only that they get the lowest possible price.  So, if
>Best Buy gets a better price than Ritz, the sales follow.
>
>It's also a lot harder today to make the same kind of aftermarket
>sales that camera stores could do back in the 1980s.  There are a lot
>less things to sell along with the camera.
>
>Conventional photography is a rapidly shrinking market for a
>photofinisher.  Even there, there is simply no way for Ritz to offer a
>price as low as Wal-Mart.
>
>That is not to say that the quality Wal-Mart offers is anything like
>what someone else could offer, who tries harder to offer quality.
>Having run labs, I know this absolutely to be the case.
>
>But to the average consumer, they either don't know or don't care
>about such quality issues.  All they know is Wal-Mart has a better
>price.
>
>When's the last time anyone asked a Wal-Mart employee to look at their
>plots, to see whether they have their chemistry in control, and to
>what extent?
>
>You can offer higher quality at a price, and increasingly, fewer
>people are willing to pay the price that a pro lab needs to charge for
>conventional photofinishing.
>
>Ritz Camera is not a pro lab by any stretch of the imagination... but
>they ain't Wal-Mart either.  Where does that leave them in today's
>marketplace?
>
>It leaves them nowhere.
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