I Don't Understand Dive Shops

[drbill]

I guess I've been really fortunate living in SoCal and diving here for 50 years. Our local dive shops are all very knowledgeable about diving here (Catalina Island) and offer both shore and boat diving. If I need help with gear (including video) they are also very helpful and knowledgeable. Owners of all shops are experienced divers (and instructors). Back when I first used SCUBA in the 60s I was in Illinois and there wasn't a dive shop in my vicinity (tanks were filled at fire stations!).

 

[boulderjohn]

If a dive shop has very limited selection, and what looks like perhaps some kind of selling arrangement with an equipment manufacturer that isn't on my drool list, is it appropriate to saying "This is the gear I want" and see if they can order it for a reasonable price? Can they do that, or are they in the same position I am as a buyer?

I will expand on what Scott said earlier.

Shops have a selling arrangement with different companies. They get a certain price for each item with an understanding that they will sell a certain amount each year. They cannot just order something from a company with whom they do not have such an arrangement. To sell you what you want from a new company, in almost all cases, they would have to agree to sell a certain amount from that company each year, and they cannot do that. Moreover, the more they sell of a certain line, the better the price they get from that company, so it is not in their best interest to carry a whole lot of different lines.

Here is an example from my own history.

I wanted to purchase a trimix gas analyzer, a very expensive piece of equipment that only a very tiny percentage of divers need. I was working for a shop, but that shop did not have a working relationship with any of the companies that sold that item. Why? Here in Colorado, pretty much nobody needs any of the items sold by such a company, so they cannot hope to sell enough to make it worth while. Only a few shops in Colorado sell any kind of gas analyzers regularly.

My shop did what they could for me. They said they would contact a company and give me the item at dealer price--no profit to them. They included me on the emails, so I saw the negotiations. The company said they would give them a dealer price of $XXX if they would agree to sell 5 regular O2 analyzers a year. There is no way that the shop would sell 5 analyzers in 10 years, let alone 1 year. Meanwhile, pretty much any of the big volume online shops would sell it to me at less than $XXX at their full retail price. How could my shop compete with that? How could they sell 5 O2 analyzers a year if their dealer price was more than the online shop's full retail price? So I bought the trimix analyzer online, but not at the retail price--they gave me an instructor discount, which they clearly could afford based on their high volume dealer price.

 

[EireDiver606]

Yes, you can request a particular instructor. Not sure how it works with the specialty classes.

Many shops have not kept up with the times.

I know what you mean about shops not promoting local diving. I live by Lake Michigan in the Chicago area. Very few shops support or promote the excellent Great Lakes wreck diving (I'm obsessed). People grit their teeth to get through the OW dives at the local quarry and then go off somewhere tropical. I'd suspect a lot of people are just totally unaware of the great wrecks we have.

I'm rather spoiled as my local dive shop also has a huge online presence and is one of the online shops a lot of folks here frequent.

Ireland is quite similar. People shrug off Ireland as a dive destination even though we have amazing waters everywhere but the Irish Sea. The thought of cold water diving makes people shrivel up. I agree with you, cold water diving is in fact amazing and more people should do it. I prefer cold water marine environments over the abused warm water touristy areas everywhere else.

 

[EireDiver606]

Yeah, but your water is cold. Ours gets up to 50 degrees (10 celsius).

That isn’t a good enough excuse.Get your appropriate thermal protection and man up.

 

[TMHeimer]

Ireland is quite similar. People shrug off Ireland as a dive destination even though we have amazing waters everywhere but the Irish Sea. The thought of cold water diving makes people shrivel up. I agree with you, cold water diving is in fact amazing and more people should do it. I prefer cold water marine environments over the abused warm water touristy areas everywhere else.

The owner of our shop, as well as at least one instructor there I know, take fairly regular tropical trips. Though they do dive locally occasionally. Most of my diving is local and in the NY area in summer when I'm there. They're OK dives. Florida panhandle when we "snowbird" is a cut above. My only tropical trip (Panama) was the best. Of course, I look at it from a shell collector's viewpoint, but regardless, I think the warmer the water the more interesting the dive (with rare exceptions I've read about). More colourful, prettier fish--other than flounders and the like. Perhaps the trick is to find tropical spots that are away from the usual touristy ones?

 

[ofg-1]

The old adage is that diving is the only business where you can spend thousands to make hundreds.

 

[Chilly_Diver]

I grew up in the Northwest, and loved to tidepool. It was clear there was a lot in the subtidal and nearshore that had to be even more interesting. While away at college, much further inland, I took an open water course from a local dive shop. At our checkout dive, someone with a new BC they had bought from the shop had an inflator leak, and our instructor basically told him he was out of luck for some technical legal reason related to the warranty. I dropped my mask during a dive, and he didn't want to look for it. So my initial exposure to dive shops involved cheesiness, or I suppose chintziness.

But then I went back to Oregon and looked into local dive shops along the coast for rental gear and to ask about good dive spots. That's where my confusion really took off. They would talk about diving in nearby lakes, and inside of jetties. Serious? With an ocean right there? I ignored that and went off to my favorite state park where a rocky shelf angles into the ocean, had the complete dumb luck to get there on a very calm day with the ocean almost flat, and had a marvelous dive after climbing down some rocks and then scrambling across a boulder in a surge channel with my gear on, to get to that spot. Later dives, in more normal ocean conditions, would help me understand why the northwest coast will never be a vacation dive mecca. Still, I was astonished that the dive experts at the dive shops had by and large not even dove the ocean much that was practically spitting distance away. But then they were all apparently barely hanging on as businessmen and all of the ones in existence then are now out of business. In fact, at present there is hardly a dive shop open anywhere along the entire coast of the Pacific Northwest. Then and now I'd expected a thriving dive industry there, but there just never has been. I guess that's economics. Hard to stay in business when what appears to be the logical body of water for diving, isn't, and everyplace else nearby is maybe not worth the expense. But are there other factors? PADI sucking too many dollars? Rental supplies being to expensive to build up an adequate roomful?

I've been busy in recent decades raising kids, but am now getting back into diving, and was looking at gear. I've been to most of the dive shops in the inland state I live in, just this week. Some of them barely have any gear at all, which is a problem for me because I like a selection to look at. Almost all of them had a sales person who couldn't tell me much about the specialty classes they might or might not offer, didn't know much about the gear available, and in some cases didn't know anything about either. Just didn't know squat. If the owner was there, that was good, but not if he or she wasn't. On top of that, there's a lot of selection available online, for less, so while I like to support local business there has to be customer service to make up for paying more. And most of the people I talked to were not providing ,much service. I also asked about OW classes for my daughters in law. Those classes are a lot more expensive now, and I suspect that's not just inflation. Are OW classes, and mask and fin sales, and air fills the only things keeping dive shops alive now? How do these places make money? While I was in one, a couple instructors were chatting with the boss, and one seemed really competent and interested in teaching rather than going through the motions. In the classes I've had, the instructor was whoever the dive shop assigned. Is it ever common for people to request a particular instructor? And the part I kept hearing about they'll do specialty classes when there's a demand--how does that work if only one person is asking at a time? They weren't even making a list of interested people. Am I missing something, or is this industry just fundamentally flawed in some way?

You mention the cost of OW training. Have you priced a 1 hour golf or ski lesson? Golf instructions make 10x what scuba instructors make yet no one bats an eye at paying $100 an hour for their time. If anything, scuba instruction is grossly underpriced.

 

[boulderjohn]

You mention the cost of OW training. Have you priced a 1 hour golf or ski lesson? Golf instructions make 10x what scuba instructors make yet no one bats an eye at paying $100 an hour for their time. If anything, scuba instruction is grossly underpriced.

I have noted this many times in the past. Many ScubaBoard posters are absolutely incensed that professional instructors expect to be paid for their work. It should be a free service in their minds. In the United States, when you pay for a course, the bulk of the price you pay goes to the shop, and in many cases that instructor you resent so much is not even making minimum wage. Tipping instructors is pretty rare, but when I have been tipped, that "little extra" I was given usually amounted to more than I was paid for teaching the class.

 

[EireDiver606]

I think the warmer the water the more interesting the dive

How dare you say that. Cold water diving is awesome, it’s an area you clearly don’t have experience in.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Cold water diving is awesome,

Port Hardy anyone?