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Two things to factor into your analysis:awap:My rather simplistic rational is I figure it doesn't need to be any more convientient to get to an LDS than it is to get to a Walmart except in areas with lots of local diving. If you have more LDSs than that then they are just stepping on each others livelyhood. It's like having too many predators and not enough prey. Some of them need to die to keep things in balance. However, in the case of Phoenix, an expansion of the prey population will also work.
1. Phoenix is one of the most spread out metropolises in the country. So the geographic dispersion of the LDS's -with one exception that I can think of offhand - means that no store is within roughly 5 miles of another. Some may be the only stores within 20 or 30 square miles. I don't really get the Walmart analogy since the entire scuba population in Arizona is probably less than what goes through a WalMart daily. Or certainly weekly.
2. I've been diving here 25 years. To my knowledge there have been two stores go out of business since then and 3-4 open as new stores - mostly in areas that were farm fields as little as 10 years ago. Afaik only 4 of the existing stores have changed ownership in that time also. Not counting Sport Chalet, the SoCal chain which recently opened 3 stores here. So most of the LDS's have been around for at least a decade.
And honestly for all the bashing that Scuba Sciences has taken here recently, they've been around longer than most other stores have and some years ago bought out one of their competitors so they must be doing something right.