do you ever notice negativity between dive shops?

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The wild dog packs you see roaming the roadsides seem to be working together and seem fairly friendly to one another.....until they find some road kill. Then, they fight one another rather brutally so they individually can get to the limited food available.

The scuba industry, in most places, has far too much supply to satisfy a limited demand. This causes the wild dog feeding behavior in the scuba folks. Sad, but true.

Phil Ellis
DiveSports.com
 
The wild dog packs you see roaming the roadsides seem to be working together and seem fairly friendly to one another.....until they find some road kill. Then, they fight one another rather brutally so they individually can get to the limited food available.

The scuba industry, in most places, has far too much supply to satisfy a limited demand. This causes the wild dog feeding behavior in the scuba folks. Sad, but true.

Phil Ellis
DiveSports.com

The real problem is it is not always road kill they prey on. Many live victims also fall prey. Once they get a victim cornered they work ruthlessly to empty the wallet and max out credit cards.

But the solution is not too difficult. Eradicate the wild dogs and support the better behaved domestic varieties.
 
In RI there are less then 10 dive shops. They all seem to get along and don't bad mouth each other...much. There is one guy that is often the butt of a joke. They do ALL HATE the online stores!
 
It seems that there is a combination of the sort of person who opens a dive shop and the perceived supply/demand.

Talking to many of the shops in my area they see things from a specific perspective. For example, Internet shopping is bad. You talk to a lot of the shops and they make little or no money on dive training. The hope is that they will make money on selling gear. Students sign up for class, ask about gear. They find they have a better selection and lower cost by shopping online. They show up to class with gear they purchased online and the store is annoyed because now they won't make any money.

Some stores will cut corners on training, not give the students the time they need, pump them through, pay the instructor less money (usually results in less experienced instructor), etc. So now they aren't losing money on the training. But they aren't making money on the gear sales and business dies off because no one recommends the shop to friends. Shops which still have good training try to compete with the pricing of online stores. Now they aren't making any money on training nor are they making money on gear.

The people in my area who open dive shops are people who do something else for a living, got into diving as a hobby and now are trying to run a business. They have no retail experience and don't know how to market what they have.

I know one shop which has lost money for years. They compete for students and they have incredibly small selection of gear. They rent the equipment for air fills and outsource servicing. Had a friend try numerous shops in the area and found them all to be lacking in quality training. They fulfilled the minimum requirements and not much more. They were totally unaware the other shop existed. When they went out to watch open water checkout dives they were really impressed with the training the students received. The shop should be charging more for training because they really have a quality product there. They just don't seem to know how to market their training as worth the extra money.

Bottom line, in my area there is a lot of competition for a small market of divers and most the shops don't seem to have the business acumen to promote what they have. It is just easier to put other shops down and hope people will believe you are the better choice of many evils.

When it comes to gear they also have to realize that all the dive shops in Canada are probably less than all the dive shops in Florida, or California, or New York, or North Carolina, or Texas, or ... thus a Canadian distributor has to work a larger region to make half as much as someone in the US.

Local dive shops here really have to start thinking globally if they are going to sell gear. Currently they are all still competing locally. You look at online stores with a local shop. The local customers benefit from the high Internet sales. Rather than bad mouthing the online stores some shops have become online stores and leveraged the benefits for their local customers.
 
In a few cases that I've seen, students and former students, will actually start something by telling shop A that shop B said this about you. Thinking that this will make them seem like a more favorable customer and maybe earn a discount for telling a secret on the other shop. Most bad blood between shops, from what I've seen, is caused by idiotic store personel that have no way to make a go of things except hope that someone walking into their shop will drink their koolaid and never think for themselves and ask questions.
 
When I worked for an LDS, the owner would come down hard on any staff he heard badmouthing the "competition". We'd been around forever and had all of the college contracts plus two course directors, so the competition wasn't really and the community saw that, we didn't need to come across as jerks to get business.

I think this is bigger than just personal dealings on a local level. At the 2009 DEMA show, I did a kind of mystery shop on the certification agencies. I claimed to be a new dive master for brand X and waited to see their response. Every agency except one (I'm not going to name names here) immediately laid into me about how lame the agency I was supposedly with was, how my training was sub par and basically tried to make me feel inferior and that my training and hard work was worthless. The one exceptions said "that's great, congratulations! If you're ever interested in crossing over to us, here are some of the things that we offer" then went into their competitive advantages. I thought this was an anomaly, so I walked around, came back to a different person and got the same reaction.

This makes me think this mentality is created at the certification agency level, which I find to be completely stupid and is just eroding our entire industry from the inside.
 
I find that there is more bad mouthing of internet dealers by LDS people than other LDS people. I have been told that a lot of internet retailers buy used gear and sell it as new. They also do not uphold warranties because they are not by the manufacturers etc.
 
This makes me think this mentality is created at the certification agency level, which I find to be completely stupid and is just eroding our entire industry from the inside.
I agree... there is a pervasive attitude that if they don't use it or dive that way, then it must be jumk. You can see this from the lowly recreational diver to the seasoned techie.
 
I am based in NY and quite particular about my gear. Unfortunately I have needed to rebuy all my kit this year, so I've been using mostly 2 local shops and one internet provider.

Made the mistake of telling one shop owner that I was going to take the double tanks he sold me to another shop for a visual and O2 cleaning. Got an earful about why that was a bad idea and was asked to remove all stickers reflecting where I had bought the tanks before I could take them with me.

Get to the next shop and hand the tanks over and get an earful over why Scuba Pro 1st stages aren't great and I should rather use their Apex regulators.

Guess that's the competitive nature of the industry. Going forward lots of reading to choose what I want. Then go find a shop that sells it.
 
The one exceptions said "that's great, congratulations!
Nick,

its my opinion that you should "out" these positive Pollies. The rest of the agencies live off being negative, and its not fair that they stay positive!!! :rofl3: [/tongue in cheek]
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/peregrine/

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