Craig Clark
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Have you ever been told that you get what you pay for? Most of us have, yet some people seem to prefer buying from online retailers rather than to buy from someone local. We all love our conveniences and in some respects if you do not have time, or just do not like crowded malls then online shopping is quick and convenient. If you shop online because you think you always get a better price then think again. What seems to be a good deal sometimes is not. In business there are reasons why some items can be sold cheaper than others for example, overstocks, discontinued items and blemished merchandise. If you are looking for bargins and you can save money by buying last years model so to speak then great you have saved yourself some money but bottom line, if there is a problem and you bought the merchandise locally, you have a brick and mortar building to go to get immediate help. Local retailers represent the manufacturers they buy from and meet all the requirments set by the manufacturer for selling a given product line. The retailer has been trained by the manufacturer and has that company backing them. Most online retailers however, get their merchandise from stores going out of business, from the grey market and yes in some cases knockoffs from China. In any case this type of merchandise has no warranty because they are not factory authorized to sell that particular brand and a local retailer is not usually willing to do anything for you because of a liability issue. All you can do at that point is send the merchandise back to where you bought it, at your expense, and wait for a long time to get results. Is this type of aggravation worth any savings? In the scuba industry, we think of certain types of gear as life support equipment like regulators for example. I have asked many people this question, if you were taking sky diving lessons would you buy a parachute online and usually they say no. I then ask why, and their answer usuall is because it is life support. Don't trust your life to something if you do not know for sure where it came from. In closing all I can say is, we all have been conditioned to look at only a price tag instead of looking outside the box at what we really get for the money. Buying anything is based strickly on emotional responses not on logic. Local business are the life blood of the community. They are the ones who have the investment in expensive equipment to do air fills, the online retailers do not. The local retailer has the expertise for education in the sport, the online retailer does not. The local retailer has expensive liability insurance which is required in order to do business, and the online retailer does not. We need to do what we can to keep the local dollars local instead of sending money off to other cities that are not concerned about your local economy. If local businesses are not supported then they will go away and that hurts everyone. Local businesses can not survive on air fills alone. When businesses go under then jobs are lost.
...And then you have shops like ScubaToys that blow all this kinda crap right out of the water!
