Genesis once bubbled...
that circumventing laws that are intended to prevent a particular behavior (in this case, vertical price restraints) is not a good practice "attacking someone's livelihood"?
You don't need to do that to make money in a business, you know. Tens of thousands of businesspeople don't undertake such practices, and yet they do just fine.
The usual argument against LP is that they're a "low cost" operator. That, of course, ignores reality - conveniently so. New York real estate, and its business climate and expense, is arguably the highest in the United States. I know - I've done business there. Its punitively expensive to be in NY.
It really is rather simple, at the end of the day. You have an industry that has gone from a cottage business, where there were no choices for the consumer, to one where consumers are becoming educated, the Internet is empowering them to talk to one another (and to buy from other sources!), and this change is not a genie that can be put back in the bottle.
The dive shop that operates on a puppy-mill mentality, and those who do it know who they are, have a serious problem. Blaming all this on a cyclical economic downturn is nonsense. Oh sure, the economy has gone through one of its normal cycles. The key word here is normal. The economy does that. If you, as a businessperson, do not have a way to make things work out for you during the normal economic cycles, you won't be eating for very long off your endeavors.
The historic reaction in this industry, as can be seen by the increasing "enforcement" activity over the last year or so by the manufacturers, has been to close ranks and try to squeeze their dealers when times get tough, in an attempt to insure that the pain is felt "equally" and nobody profits at anyone else's expense.
The problem is that this strategy is only effective if you can plug all the leaks, and for obvious reasons that can't be done.
Then add into this at least one EU investigation into dealer relations practices that I'm aware of - and by the way, the EU takes a VERY dim view of pricing restraints - and you've got trouble. Perhaps really big trouble.
The bottom line is that LP, DiveInn and Simply Scuba are not going to go away.
The dive industry TRIED to get rid of a "direct" marketer or SNORKELS once upon a time. Through a dealer association called "SRA", they attempted to organize a blackball campaign of the manufacturer. The FTC got involved and sued the SRA, and the organization ended up withering on the vine; the result was ultimately a default judgment against them.
Rather than learn, the manufacturers and retailers decided instead to get cute, and find loopholes in the law. Nobody denies they exist - they do. But exactly how big they are, and exactly how successful sticking your neck through a loophole is and will be, is never knowable in advance.
What is knowable is that from my point of view and in my opinion such an action is ethically bankrupt. Of course that's just my opinion - yours may differ.
This same kind of screaming and reaction to mail order sales (there was no Internet then) took place 20 years ago in the photography industry. I was there. I was shooting semi-pro at the time, buying both hardware and expendables (paper, chemicals, etc) in large volume. I had a camera shop refuse to honor a warranty on a mail-ordered item. That was very intelligent of them - it cost them over $3,000 worth of paper and chemical sales over the next six months from me alone. Oh, they made the same argument that the LDSs make now - "where 'ya gonna get your paper and chemicals if you don't support us?" I'll tell 'ya where - mail order. Yeah, the quantities to make the shipping worth it were a lot larger, so I pooled with a couple of other shutterbugs and we bought in larger lots. So what?
Two years later, they were gone; closed up. Why? Lack of business. Simple. The same story was repeated all over the country. Go ahead and try to find the little local camera shop with a full-line of cameras from "point and shooters" to high-end SLRs (now both in digital and film.) In the main, you can't. Nearly all of them are gone.
How many other people did they drive away? I don't know. What I DO know is that they drove me away on hardware sales with fixed-price, full-list practices, and they lost my expendable business (which up until that point they had nearly exclusively) over their hard-nosed attempt to "stick it" to me for being disloyal on my hardware buys, and they threatened me with claims that I could not possibly get what I needed to keep shooting pictures without them - just like the LDSs make the argument today about fills.
In short, they acted exactly like most dive shops act now, and they did it with the same collusion and wink and nod from the camera makers that the scuba manufacturers supply today.
The LDS operators would do well to learn from the past, lest they end up like the local camera store. All closed up. Now, hardware is primarily sold online; a few specialty retailers remain, but not many. Few people buy their "real" cameras from the full-price retailers. Most buy from 17th Street or similar. The local store cut off his own nose and bled to death right in front of me.
There ARE solutions that keep the LDS in business.
But they all involve having the LDS attitude changing from one of believing that divers need THEM to understanding that they need DIVERS.
