[rollei_list] Re: Ritz Camera in Chapter 11
- From: David Sadowski <dsadowski@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:41:14 -0600
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.
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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