DEMA is where these people can get together and "the shops" can pick which places to organize travel to by whichever booth offers to pay their bar tab in addition to their comp'd room.
I can absolutely promise you, without a shadow of a doubt, that "the shops" don't choose their next travel location by "whichever booth offer to pay their bar tab in addition to their comp'd room". Like selling dive equipment, renting dive gear, servicing equipment, and any other service offered by a dive shop, travel is a product offered by a full service dive store. It is not a paid vacation for the shop owner and the employees. When an employee leads a trip to a travel destination, they are at work and they are on the payroll. Like all work, it is work. My employees would actually prefer NOT to lead the trip. After all, they have already worked a lot of long weeks. Running a dive trip is hard work, as is planning the trip and everything else associated with making it a fun experience for the customers.
For a dive shop, travel is a gigantic export of revenue, dollars that are limited in most family budgets. If you plan enough foreign trips, you customers will have NOTHING left to spend in your store! Disposable income is limited for most people. To make it worse, dive shop commissions for those exported dollars are extremely small....are smaller than the margin on any other product or service they sell. On a dive trip for 16 customers, that might represent $30,000 to $45000, a dive shop is lucky to make a commission of $3000 to $4500. This is a GROSS commission. There are real costs that must be paid from that commission. They still must purchase an airplane ticket for the trip leader, must bear the cost of promoting the trip, and must pay the employee for the time there, and must bear the risk of forfeited deposits should something go wrong. Take my word for it....this is NOT a gigantic windfall for the average shop. Worst of all, this extremely low margin sale nearly depletes the average customers entire available disposable income that can be dedicated to scuba purchases, resulting in less money they can spend on the more profitable goods and services in the shop.
Now, I am not saying that shops should stop travel to foreign destinations. I think we should actually do MORE travel. I am simply saying that the industry should not tolerate the poor distribution of those dollars. Shops should make FAR MORE profit from travel than is currently possible.
DEMA is where your LDS picks out which 3 brands of fin they think you should have the choice of wearing.
The distribution system for scuba equipment is broken. The average local dive store has less than $250,000 total annual revenue. Equipment is purchased directly from the manufacturer. The decision to carry a single brand often comes with a buy-in in excess of $50,0000. And, sales requirements to maintain the brand are often quite high. With a total sales volume of $250,000, it is impossible for most stores to carry more than one or two brands.
In addition, the major manufacturers run a "franchise" system without actually complying with the actual franchise laws in place in most states. They make "secret" promises not to give the line to any other store within a given number of miles. In a city with 3 dive stores, it is very unlikely that more than one of them will have the same big brand. This is not a business where the dive shop "chooses the three brands of fins they think you should have". They can't have every brand because of the broken distribution system that is in place. They make choices on the one or two, or three brands they will carry based on what is actually available to them and based on what makes sound business sense. Remember, for a dive retailer, the dive shop is actually their living, and they must do it in a way that makes sound business sense.
Let's focus on this thread. DEMA is actually simply a group major manufacturers, operating in the aggregate to promote their own interests. Look at the people who serve on the board of directors. They represent the biggest of the biggest in both equipment, training, and travel. They collectively bear some responsibility for things like the absurd distribution system of equipment and the poor commission paid to dive stores in return for exporting large numbers of customers and large numbers of dollars to locations that probably wouldn't survive WITHOUT the dive stores. This thread is about the DEMA organization and the people who support it. The DEMA show and all of our opinions about how it should be operated are simply the "straw man" in the discussion. Trust me, the problem isn't the show. The problem is the organization.
Anyway, just my opinion.
Phil Ellis
www.divesports.com
