Most shops drive away such customers with their "we're
knowledgeable and we've been here forever" attitude, as if that's
supposed to justify their 6% below-list pricing. Add back sales tax
and you're basically paying full retail.
Not sure where you live, and maybe local pricing is unusually bad there, but in my experience, which is fairly extensive, most local camera stores don't charge anything like 6% below suggested list price -- at least not on hardgoods like cameras and lenses. Suggested list on camera hardgoods has traditionally been set about 40% over book wholesale cost in the photo industry for many years. Non-mail-order camera specialty dealers have been averaging about 8-20% profit margins on hardgoods, depending on category, for the last 10-15 years, maybe longer. That profit information is collected and analyzed every year by the photo industry's trade organization, the Photo Marketing Association.
I was a sales and technical rep for Nikon for almost eight years in the 1990s. In total, I handled somewhere in the vicinity of 200 camera specialty stores in 7 western states at one time or another during that period. Nearly all of those dealers fit the 8-20% profit margin pattern (though a few did, indeed, attempt to get 30-40% margins on hardgoods, almost always without much success.) Here's a typical pricing breakdown for a popular, on-the-market-for-awhile SLR camera (the N90s) whose price I happen to remember (not perfectly, but fairly close) from 1995 or so:
Suggested list: $1200
Dealer wholesale: $722 less 3% "cash discount" less 3% co-op advertising allowance (which the dealer must spend on advertising) = "net net net" cost of @ $679.
B&H price: $719
Typical really competitive big city dealer: $749
Typical fairly competitive dealer: $769-799 but would negotiate a little, especially if it was a package purchase.
Now, some caveats: in the late 90s Nikon started calculating their suggested list prices at a lower margin -- about 25-30% instead of 40%. They said it was done to more accurately reflect typical street pricing because nobody sold at list anymore, but they really did it because it made their products look cheaper in magazine reviews. It had no real effect on retail dealer practices or pricing, nor was it intended to. In other words, it made the retailer look like he was selling closer to list but he was still making the same slim margin. In general, the 40% over cost suggested list price rule is less closely adhered to in the industry now compared to ten or fifteen years ago.
Digital photo products are a little different. Many companies have begun publishing an "estimated street price", which is distinct from suggested list, for their digital products. This practice comes, I believe, from the computer industry. With digital cameras, estimated street is usually about 20% over book wholesale. More importantly, the industry as a whole is trying to actually sell digital cameras at that 20% margin, and, to a surprising degree, dealers are adhering to it. Even B&H frequently sells digital cameras at the official estimated street, which represents an unusually large profit margin for them.
The reason that the industry is trying to maintain a higher retail margin on digital products is this: digital camera sales don't generate photofinishing business for the retailer who sold the camera (or at least that is the current wisdom.) The whole argument for selling cameras at 10% profit margins, which is far below the minimum margin necessary to keep a retail store open, was based on the idea that customers would bring their film back into the store for developing. Photofinishing
is highly profitable. Digital products don't fit that "Gillete" sales model (give away the razor, make a fortune on the razor blades.) Or at least, no one has yet figured out a Gillete style sales model that will work with digital cameras.
The camera manufacturers don't really care whether individual retailers make money or not, but they are partially cooperating with retailers in maintaining the 20% digital margin because they don't want to end up with only 8 or 10 big retailers selling 90% of their cameras (i.e. B&H, Ritz, and Wal-Mart et. al.) That situation would give the retailers in question too much power over the manufacturers -- "the tail wagging the dog" is how I've usually heard it phrased.
Okay, more than anybody probably wanted to know. I should get back to work now.
). In a camera stores in Melbourne a SECOND HAND Canon 70-200 2.8 L lense, the non IS version, will set you back approx $US1200-$1300.
faced with chains such as Jessops and mail order/internet, unless they start getting wiser, they'll inevitably die out.
