Why I have decided to stop shopping for ANYTHING at the LDS

[rigdiver]

Jon;
You seem to have the right point of view on this. I know plenty of firefighters that get their air fills at the "station." It costs them nothing. Who pays for it? We all know the answer to that don't we. Who would be negligent for knowingly running filters past the manufacturers stated life?
Did I ever say a LDS was loosing $35-40 per tank--------NO, I did not. I did say if air fills kept up with other commodities they would be in the $50 range. Of course now I expect someone to argue that air is not a commodity. Check with your accountant and the state comptroller before weighing in please.
Bill

 

[BarryNL]

Well, I'd just like to improve LDS image a bit with my experience of buying a new dive light recently. I went to the shop and the sales guy there spent over an hour showing me all the different lights in the shop and explaining the pros and cons of each sort. Finally, I decided on a light for which they only had the battery and cable in stock but not the light head, so they have ordered it and gave me the shop's display unit to use until mine comes in.

Needless to say, I'll probably be buying my next bit of dive kit there too.

 

[TomP]

Jon;
Did I ever say a LDS was loosing $35-40 per tank--------NO, I did not. I did say if air fills kept up with other commodities they would be in the $50 range. Of course now I expect someone to argue that air is not a commodity. Check with your accountant and the state comptroller before weighing in please.
Bill

Kind of a broad brush. LCD wrist watches cost about $100 when they first came out, now they come in cereal boxes.

At the end of the day the best business model wins. Each LDS needs to firgure out for themselves how to optimize their revenue stream. Since there is at least some correlation between the size potential customer base and revenue it seems to me that an internet sales channel would be a logical next step for a lot of LDS which, as Johnnythan has pointed out a couple of times, is exactly what the more successful guys have done.

 

[Wayward Son]

When you consider the total costs of labor, I'm surprized that air fills are as cheap as they are. My main LDS gets $3.50, the other $4.00.

In 1984, in Nashville, TN, fills were $2.00. So at most, in 21 years, the cost has doubled, and that's at shops that are close to the coast & selling a LOT more fills than that shop hoped to, and doing it year round while those shos mostly sold snow ski gear for half the year.

From a cost POV, having my own compressor would not be a money saver on the fills alone. The main thing it would save me is time & convenience, as my 2 LDS's are 45 miles from home. I usually get around this hassle by filling at another LDS in PC after my dives, commonly about a 30 minute drive across town out of my way prior to heading home. So it would be really nice to fill them at home, but then I have all the overhead costs myself: Cost of the compressor, maintenance, filters, space (that I'm real short on in this house, LOL) and so on. And since I dive nitrox, I'd have to set it up O2 clean, buy O2 for mixing, add a stick & so on.

Being a rather lazy fart, I really don't mind paying $3.50 for air and $8.00 for EAN32 somehwere else & leave the extra headaches for them to deal with. I just look forward to the day when I live considerably closer to one of those places

 

[mstudley]

Fris, you think you could run the Scubatoys website out of your cable connection for $20/month? Respectfully, you obviously have no clue.

Putting up a web site that will handle the volume of e-commerce traffic of a site like Leisurepro or Scubatoys is big bucks. You either need staff and nontrivial infrastructure to do it in-house, or you need to pay much bigger bucks than $20/month for a professional to do it and do it right.

The point is that this is ON TOP OF all the overhead of running a brick and mortar store, which is what most of these online shops are! Saying that an online shop like Leisurepro, with a storefront and staff in MANHATTAN, has less overhead than your LDS is absurd to the extreme.

How can you tell someone who has worked in the industry for years that they don't have a clue respectfully?

Obviously if you are setting up a high (not moderate) volume site like LeisurePro or ScubaToys the initial cost and overhead is higher.... just like Home Depot has more overhead costs than Joe Schmoe's hardware down the street. Home Depot also does much higher volume business... Just like LeisurePro does much higher volume sales than your LDS does. This isn't what we're talking about. At least that's not what I was talking about.

It [can] cost -so- much less to run an online shop THAN it does a brick and mortar store.

I'm pretty sure I never mentioned LeisurePro or ScubaToys at all in my original post.

As for the staff and non-trivial infrastructure to run a simple ecommerce site... that's just not true. The hardware is cheap now, software to do all this is free and the staff can be one person. Again, nobody is talking about setting up LeisurePro2.com in your basement.

 

[MEL-DC Diver]

How can you tell someone who has worked in the industry for years that they don't have a clue respectfully?

Obviously if you are setting up a high (not moderate) volume site like LeisurePro or ScubaToys the initial cost and overhead is higher.... just like Home Depot has more overhead costs than Joe Schmoe's hardware down the street. Home Depot also does much higher volume business... Just like LeisurePro does much higher volume sales than your LDS does. This isn't what we're talking about. At least that's not what I was talking about.



I'm pretty sure I never mentioned LeisurePro or ScubaToys at all in my original post.

As for the staff and non-trivial infrastructure to run a simple ecommerce site... that's just not true. The hardware is cheap now, software to do all this is free and the staff can be one person. Again, nobody is talking about setting up LeisurePro2.com in your basement.

Respectfully, I think setting up LeisurePro2.com is the point. An LDS setting up a basic site of what they currently stock isn't going to cut it. No significant discounts apply without volume, and volume doesn't come without a large customer base that is seeking diverse products. A Joe Schmoe's hardware down the street wouldn't last more than a year once Home Depot moved in. Unless it specializes in niche items, it hasn't got a chance. People want it fast, they want it cheap, and they want selection.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Respectfully, I think setting up LeisurePro2.com is the point. An LDS setting up a basic site of what they currently stock isn't going to cut it. No significant discounts apply without volume, and volume doesn't come without a large customer base that is seeking diverse products. A Joe Schmoe's hardware down the street wouldn't last more than a year once Home Depot moved in. Unless it specializes in niche items, it hasn't got a chance. People want it fast, they want it cheap, and they want selection.

Agreed ... but this is where the business model breaks down. You can't have it both ways. High-volume on-line businesses will certainly put your LDS under ... as you say, they can't compete. And without the small LDS located convenient to the divers/dive sites ... where do you get your cylinders filled? In high-volume locations like south Florida, the solution is obvious ... there are already successful businesses like Fill Express who only do gas fills. But what about the mid- to low-volume areas (like most of the rest of the world) where such a business wouldn't have sufficient volume to be viable? I don't think the local fire station is the solution ... I'm sure many wouldn't mind doing an occasional fill as a friendly service, but they're not going to want divers in and out of the station with scuba tanks all day.

So before y'all agree to put your LDS out of business, do give some consideration to the rest of the story ... namely that somehow you're gonna have to get those tanks filled up before you can take them out for a dive.

For most of us, getting air fills from ScubaToys or LeisurePro just isn't a practical alternative ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[pants!]

Local sporting goods stores might be well advised to get in on the action.

Oshman's, The Sports Authority, Dick's, etc... many of them do CO2 fills for paintball behind the hunting counter. It would be a drop in the bucket to many of these big box stores to put a compressor and nitrox stick in the back next to the ski tuning shop or CO2 bank or whatever and charge $5 for air and $14 for nitrox and be done with it.

Put a bulletin board with local instructors' phone numbers right next to it, and maybe have a few sets of rental gear if they want to really get into it.

They don't need to have an entire SCUBA section, and the LDS would suddenly become kinda obsolete.

 

[PhotoTJ]

... My main expense is gasoline to run it.

And we all know how cheap gas has been lately.

 

[teknitroxdiver]

And we all know how cheap gas has been lately.

Yeah, but it's not like this is a 310HP turbocharged engine sucking gas at 18 gph.