The Great local dive shop vs. online debate

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One thing I noticed is that if the lds knows you bought online they will raise the price of their service, therfore let them think you bought it while you lived somewhere else or while you were on vacation.

how an LDS should put themselves out of business.

To price service differentially if you bought from THEM .vs. all others is one thing, but to target a specific firm is another.

The latter, when you have chosen to buy from them, says that they are attempting to harm you, and should be responded to in kind.
 
I would venture a guess that those folks who are knoking the LDS have never been in retail. Making payroll, paying rent etc. The big boys DO buy cheaper and can afford to significantly discount. The little guy simply can't. That said the LDS MUST offer something to get you to pony up to higher prices. Exclusive lines, products, services, etc. I shop online and at my LDS. It depends on where I am most comfortable making the purchase. I bought my wetsuit at the LDS and my BC online as an example. This entire industry reminds me of the consumer electronics indrustry in the seveties and eighties. Any of you old farts remember independent TV stores? There use to thousands. They are gone replaced by either Circuit City or Best Buy. It IS important to patronize the LDS especially if they are doing a credible job with service. If the LDS goes I don't think Wal Mart is going to start doing airfills next to the gun counter anytime soon. I also don't believe that there is any chance of LP opening a store in you local burg either so you can rent equipment. Find a good LDS and support them WHEN it makes sense. The good ones will convince you to part with your dollars in some way. Most cities and towns still support one high end electronics retailer. ( Who can actually put together a good deal on a number of things including service). The bad ones will go bye bye. The one that survives will depend on which one you support as best you can. So ask questions and pick the good one. COSTCO is not going to be the best place to buy dive equipment any time soon.

MFG's are also going to have to get smart as well. Have you ever tried to comparison shop Circuit and Best Buy? You'll notice that the model numbers are always slightly different. HHHHMMMMM! They can make it hard or easier for the LDS to suceed. Special pricing, terms, features etc.

I for one want to see my LDS survive and prosper. Where else can you wander in and have someone to talk to about diving that actually understands?
 
.....very valid points you made. I concur.

Genesis although I did sign your petition, I did so in order to convince the MFGs to allow competitive and open pricing for the shops, I cannot support the LDS bashing that you seem to continue to do.

Why? Why are you convinced that they are all bad business people because they don't violate their contracts?

These people have the shops for at least two reasons 1) to be an independant business person 2) the love of the sport of diving.

The success of any business boils down to one thing and one thing only.....buying customers.

To get these customers to purchase can be achieved many ways...(not necessary to list)

I am getting tired of seeing the small business person getting pushed out of business by big box stores.

LDS are no different. Not everyone can afford to buy compressors and in many cases it may not be practical. Many of us do not have the storage nor the resources to build a shop or the compressor. Genesis I know you have achieved these as you have outlined how to build the compressor in previous posts. I applaude your succes and it is great you can put your past success in business to good use now.

If there are no LDS around, what do the rest of us do for air adn service?

Does anyone have these answers?

I don't, I don't have a clue what to do if my LDS and all the little LDS closes. Am I going to have to drive 2-3 hrs to get air? and not 35-45 mins?

Sorry for the rant folks. Genesis I am not "picking " on you particularily. I know you have broad shoulders and can take the rant.
 
Another often overlooked benefit of your LDS isn't just air fills its training. Genesis it’s easy for you to try and hold a local LDS to be competitive against LP (or any of the other online retailers) you apparently have a compressor and are already certified. However if failing to support your LDS forces them out of business you will lose the primary source of new divers.

Maybe your LDS should work to become more competitive when it comes to equipment pricing. Heck they can just double the cost of training to continue to operate. Call up LP and ask them about lessons for that specialty you'd like to get or for your friend that would like to learn to dive.

I growing number of divers mean that equipment mfg's will have a market demanding new products and safer products. Take the market away and say goodbye to innovation and progress.
 
For an inland dive shop it's a strange business.

The casual vacation diver doesn't need an LDS. They do all their diving out of town and they have all year to get the little bit of service they need done. If they even know we're here we may see them once or twice a year when they come in to buy a $5 gift for a friend. With these people the only chance to make anything is if you can certify them and sell them an equipment package. After that you'll never see them again. Nothing will get them to dive locally and their need for service, training and equipment will never increase.

Then you have the SERIOUS diver, the tech divers. Most don't need a dive shop and many have connections going back many years and sell tech lines of equipment out of the trunk of their car. For instance a freind of mine was the biggest OMS dealer in the country several years in a row and he sold to freinds out of his SUV.

Then there is the small number of active local divers that aren't independant enough to not need a dive shop. This used to be a diveshops bread and butter. However the market is small and for a shop to survive it need to have this as an exclusive market AND...at a descent markup. Many of the manufacturers rules are designed to do exactly that. We have blatantly broken dealer agreements to sell cheaper. We did sell more but the local market just isn't big enough and at the lower markup it isn't worth my time.

I just had another website developed (a really neat online store) that probably won't go online because I can't reduce online prices without getting cought and loosing my sources of equipment. Without a larger market lower prices won't keep us going.

We'll be closed the first part of August. I won't need a dive shop. I service my own stuff, have a kick-ass compressor and have enough sources of equipment to keep myself going.
 
lamenting that "times have changed" may be a great story over a beer or three, but it won't un-change the times.

You may hate Wal-Mart. I love 'em. We have two Supercenters within a half-hour drive and I buy a LOT of stuff there that would otherwise be purchased at twice the price somewhere else.

They have cut my cost of living dramatically, and that's not "bad".

It is not my job to "spread my paycheck" to local businesses who are uwilling to make the value comparison work. In fact, it is precisely my job to NOT reward people who are unwilling to do what is necessary to make that value comparison in a way that I, as a consumer, find their offering, in total, superior.

You say the "big guy" can always out-price the little guy. True. Been in retail for over a decade. To some extent I still am. Trying to sell commodity products (and fact is, diving gear IS a commodity product) as an "exclusive" thing never works for long, unless you can play games with the marketplace that are, or at least are supposed to be, illegal.

The only way to out-DEAL the big-box is to offer something unique and special - that I can't get from the big box. That ain't commodity hardware. It won't be fills either; they're not hard to offer, nor "specialized". Witness what WalMart and others are doing to the local Propane dealers with the "Blue Rhino" kiosks. Out-competing them, that's what. More convenient, competitive price, and you get a certified-known-good (and new-looking) cylinder in exchange - all ready to go.

Can't happen in the scuba market? Why not?

Part of why I put up Diver's Union is because cross-subsidization ends up screwing most people to benefit those who are in the "underclass." In this case who it screws is all existing divers to "feed" the store with a bunch of new divers who are both unsophisticated and wide-eyed fish-watchers, who can be talked into spending twice as much as they have to during their OW cert class - offered at near-zero cost.

The problem with this is that its the essence of deception and, dare I say it, fraud. Not in the legal sense perhaps, but certainly in the ethical sense.

I was told a few of those lies myself. That the mail order places sold "counterfeit" gear, with serial numbers altered, missing, or just flat fraudulently mislabelled. That there would be NO warranty support of any kind of you bought from them. That you'd DIE if you bought from them for this reason, as its "life support equipment". And many, many more.

Every one of those statements I later proved to be false. And they weren't "white lies" either - they were told with the express intent of separating me from my money, were materially false, knowingly deceptive, and slanderous to the organizations they maligned on top of it.

When discovered by myself, they destroyed the trust and faith in the shop that had been built to that point. If the shop's owners and employees would lie to me about the truly BIG STUFF - claiming that I would in fact DIE if I didn't buy from an LDS - could I realistically trust ANYTHING - including the purity of the air they sell or even if the toilet in their store would flush when I pushed the lever?

Rigging a market - intentionally - for the purpose of selling new divers, many of whom will drop out within a few months - thousands of dollars of gear that there is no rational economic argument for purchasing is wrong. Building an industry on that premise is even more wrong. Cooking the structure of the offerings so that classes are "cheap" but subsidized by gear purchases to the point that shops are almost compelled to engage in unethical sales tactics to get them during those classes is WAY over the line of ethical dealing.

Yet that's how it is.

And while the manufacturers, today, seem to be the ones "forcing" this matter, the fact of the matter is that this too is a deception. No manufacturer would get away with this unless their dealers DEMANDED it. How come? Without dealers, the manufacturer has no outlet for his product. Even better, the honest manufacturers - and there are a few - will and have told me this!

Only when the LDSs stop these practices, apologize for their past transgressions, and publically condemn them for those who refuse to cease, will I consider the matter closed.
 
I consider the matter closed and nobody has to do anything.
 
You may hate Wal-Mart. I love 'em. We have two Supercenters within a half-hour drive and I buy a LOT of stuff there that would otherwise be purchased at twice the price somewhere else.

They have cut my cost of living dramatically, and that's not "bad".
One thing the WalMarts of the world have done is cut the QUALITY of life in the small towns of the US. Small business owners have been sent packing in droves by the WalMarts of the world. In my opinion that is very bad. I wouldn't buy anything from a from a WalMart no matter what the savings.
 
It isn't just dive equipment that has become a comodity in diving. Training and diving itself has gone the same rout. It's training in a can and diving in a can. As time goes on those who want the real thing will have to look much harder to find it. The entire business is about the busy vacation diver who wants it fast and cheap and doesn't care to be bothered with the details or the finer points.

There are those who find value in a shop like mine but they are few. I have nothing to offer the casual vacation diver. At least nothing that's worth my time or theirs..
 
It isn't just dive equipment that has become a comodity in diving. Training and diving itself has gone the same rout. It's training in a can and diving in a can. As time goes on those who want the real thing will have to look much harder to find it. The entire business is about the busy vacation diver who wants it fast and cheap and doesn't care to be bothered with the details or the finer points.

There are those who find value in a shop like mine but they are few. I have nothing to offer the casual vacation diver. At least nothing that's worth my time or theirs..

.... what is the problem with that Mike?

See, I went through this too, in a different industry.

My computer consulting/network access/network consulting business began long before (10 years, in fact) there was a thing called "the Internet" as we know it today. It began back before Usenet news was moved by modem over a protocol called "UUCP", now a curiosity piece, a network service called "PC Pursuit" (originally designed and sold for people to call BBS systems in other states, which myself and a few other enterprising souls "adapted" for this purpose), and a few other bits and pieces. I got to be a pioneer in the transition of Usenet into the "public accessability", as opposed to "ivory tower university researcher" camps.

When the first "Internet" (real-time, dedicated line) connections were sold (and I bought one for resale) the only people who could use the Internet were those who either knew or were willing to learn the Unix command line structure.

That's all there was, you see.

No graphical interface.

No browsers.

Just a text, command line set of tools, most with very archaic names ("ls" to list a directory, for example.)

Those folks were like the original divers - robust, rugged individuals willing to invest hundreds of hours of their own time learning the ropes, willing to take personal risk (and frustration) in doing so, working with archaic (by today's standards) tools that were difficult to use, required memorization and very counter-intuitive patterns of behavior.

That group included myself; in fact, I STILL read email and Usenet using those very same (well, ok, later versions of) archaic tools!

My business clientele was quite small. A few hundred rugged individuals, who didn't often complain, expected some problems and bumps in the road, were willing to invest a lot of their time - and money - in learning and buying things they needed, etc.

Sound familiar? It should, because its exactly what diving used to be. And what Internet access used to be.

Along comes 1993/94, and the introduction of a thing called "Mosaic" for both the PC and Mac. The Mac had a SLIP and PPP dialer; the PC did not. The Mac became the first "user friendly" Internet appliance. Shortly thereafter, a pair of "dialers" were introduced for Windows 3.1, which shortened the curve somewhat, but still gave us fits in terms of support.

Then Windows 95 hit the market and the world exploded.

Suddenly there were a million - literally - inexperienced people who wanted only to surf the web. They not only didn't care about Unix, they didn't want to learn about it either. Any part of it. If you couldn't drop in a CD or floppy and load up the software in 5 minutes, with zero trouble, hitches or hassles, you lost them as a customer.

Forever.

Further, they wanted their access CHEAPLY, even though they were MUCH more intensive to support than the former customer type was. They considered any problem they had to be ours, instead of theirs, even if they bought the cheapest piece of junk equipment they could find and then had reliability problems.

It was still my problem, and the screaming and hollering became legend around my offices.

Sound familiar again? It should, because that's the vacation diver.

Now, I could have stuck to the old model.

And died.

Instead, I adapted. I developed new products and services that were easier to use. I adjusted my pricing. I came up with an "instant install", at significant cost, pressed CDs, started handing them out, and put in near-24-hour tech support. I re-wrote the entire administrative and customer management side of the business, spending over 1,000 hours of my personal time developing custom software to make what was a human-intensive process nearly 100% automatic handling billing, customer management, account setup and auditing.

Gross margins went down quite a bit, as support and overhead costs rose significantly. But revenues went WAY up, as the customer count exploded. Why? Because I catered to the market. I gave the customers of the day what they wanted. I found a way to adapt my business model to meet the market's needs, with what at that point was over a hundred competitors in my local area.

And the customer count went from a few hundred to over 10,000.

All without a hint of price-fixing (in fact, quite the opposite), without lying about the others in the marketplace, or committing any other unsavory acts. In fact, there was enough business that I was able to stick to my guns on several issues of importance to me (like not providing access to stolen software or kiddie porn groups) even though they cost me a significant amount of business and made me highly controversial in the marketplace.

Is there a parallel in the diving buisness? You bet. No longer is the market primarily comprised of "rugged individuals." Now its primarily what you call, with derision in your voice, "vacation divers."

However, instead of adapting as an industry, virtually all of the LDSs have instead chosen to close ranks and try to protect what was a valid business model yesterday, but which will not work for the customers of today. They have no reason to pay price-controlled prices for commodity hardware when they can get it somewhere else for (far) less. They want a quick way to get in the water easily and with relative safety, and they have and can get that.

The response of the industry in trying to protect an old, no-long-valid model is disgusting. Instead of adapting, the industry has taken to protectionism, deception and outright lying.

And the end result? The LDS is dying.

And its their own fault.
 

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