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Another Big Camera Store Fails:

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Interesting article. I've read similar reasons for brick-and-mortar photographic retail casualties elsewhere. It is sad, but I will admit I am part of the problem. Not long ago, I bought a lens from one of the NY online stores. Normally, the lens was $800, and both the NY store and my local brick-and-mortar store were charging the same amount. The difference is that the local store was charging 8.6% in sales tax, to the tune of almost $69. Not only that, but the particular NY online store was the only store that had a $100 rebate that lasted just two days. I jumped on the deal, saving myself almost $169. I love my two local camera stores. But with 8+% sales tax, anything over about $500 starts to become a no-go with them, especially when the NY online stores usually are charging little to nothing for shipping. We once had five major camera stores in my city, but we're down to two. I suspect within a few years we'll be down to one.
 
As an aside: I imagine that retailers were less than thrilled to take pre-orders on Nikon DL, only to have it never ship.
 
I can see why. I purchased a new em5mk2 4 weeks ago online from global it was %40 cheaper and arrived in 3 days to Au, our local camera stores didn't even have stock and said it would take a week to get it in. every time I go into a camera store they have very little stock and still want the big prices.

and for the record a mate opened a big hobby shop 12 months ago with a large amount of stock and spares and is flat out and doing very well, to many companies want to much from to little these days.

cheers don

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Olympus EM5, EM5mk2 my toys.
http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/9412035244
past toys. k100d, k10d,k7,fz5,fz150,500uz,canon G9.
 
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Simply they failed to change with consumer behaviours and modify their business model.

Sales tax is just a poor excuse. There are more customers outside of Georgia than inside of Georgia.
 
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Gray market cameras sold on eBay are aren't helping these shops either. Camera Manufacturers will do anything to move their products even undercut their distribution partners. Sad to see but it's obvious everyone is getting desperate in this Industry.

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Too legit to quit.
 
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I think cameras are now regarded as "consumables" instead of "cameras", and this has perpetuated the problem. I remember in the early '90s witnessing a walk-in customer proudly leaving a Phoenix camera store with a high-end Contax 35mm camera he paid top dollar for. You just don't have that mindset with consumers regarding "consumables" nowadays. Low margins many times are the name of the game when things are regarded as throwaways.
 
Manufacturers are shooting themselves in the feet. They got too greedy with volume. Should have stretched it out and put less pressure on retailers.

Note how CIPA documents shipments and not consumer sales. In other words as long as manufacturers can get retailers to buy cameras they wash their hands and please investors. But the reality as at the consumer level people are not buying a lot of these cameras. This is why they keep coming back as "refurbished" or whatever.

I think the secondhand market is also a big factor. I don't see an outfit like KEH going anywhere. There will always be that churn. It's sad because retailers like this are the ones getting burnt for the poor decsions of the manufacturers.
 
Why is the guy going to DC to lobby for a state issue?
 
HRC2016 said:
Why is the guy going to DC to lobby for a state issue?
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I think because the bill in question requires sellers in non-GA states to collect tax for buyers from GA. This would require some federal enforcement I believe.
 
sportyaccordy said:
Note how CIPA documents shipments and not consumer sales.
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This is purely a practical issue. CIPA is trade association of Japanese camera manufacturers. The individual companies self-report their shipping numbers to CIPA, and CIPA publishes the totals. CIPA does not operate outside of Japan and as far as I can tell (I'm not a member and don't read Japanese) doesn't do very much retail-level research. They are of, for, and about Japanese manufacturers.

Tracking global retail sales is about 1000X more difficult. Only one or two market research firms try to do it for cameras. (I've seen global retail market share estimates from IDC, but nobody else that I can remember.) They produce estimates based on a sampling of retailers, and they charge many thousands of dollars to anyone who wants the information.

There are more market research firms who do regional retail sales estimates -- firms who specialize in Europe, say, or North America. But again, they charge many thousands of dollars for the data.

The camera manufacturers are among the main customers for these reports, so they are, in fact, very much interested in consumer sales. They just get the information from sources other than CIPA, which has a different mission and doesn't have the tools to do it.
 
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techjedi said:
I think because the bill in question requires sellers in non-GA states to collect tax for buyers from GA. This would require some federal enforcement I believe.
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Yes, it's a very thorny issue in the federal system of the United States (the word 'federal' used here in the sense meaning that many government powers are not vested in the national government but instead are vested in regional governments [i.e. the states]).
 
When I was in manufacturing in the 1970s (and in a competitive industry), 8% was a big deal - in fact a deal breaker.

Nobody likes taxes, but allowing out of state merchants to dodge state sales taxes put a number of marginal brick and mortar outfits out of business and we are all to poorer for it.
 
ttran88 said:
Gray market cameras sold on eBay are aren't helping these shops either. Camera Manufacturers will do anything to move their products even undercut their distribution partners. Sad to see but it's obvious everyone is getting desperate in this Industry.
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The manufacturers, per se, aren't doing it. For the most part, it's the other regional sales subsidiaries who are responsible for supplies of gray market products (in the camera industry).

In other words, it's really somebody like Canon China who is undercutting Canon USA. In cases where a regional distributor is not a subsidiary of the manufacturer (still an assortment of those around the world), the disregard for what happens to other distributors is typically even greater.
 
Richard Frederick said:
Nobody likes taxes, but allowing out of state merchants to dodge state sales taxes put a number of marginal brick and mortar outfits out of business and we are all to poorer for it.
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This issue has been around for decades in the U.S., but the Internet has intensified it because it's now so much easier for anyone to find, and buy, products from out-of-state retailers. The friction involved in out-of-state purchases is much, much lower than it was when I worked in a California camera store in the late 1980s.

But it was an issue for us even then. We always had a small number of customers who asked us to swallow the state sales tax and, when we didn't, they'd buy mail order.

It's a fundamental unfairness in U.S. retailing, but not one that I think has much chance of ever being changed. Our federal system, and a long history of states guarding their autonomy, makes it a difficult knot to untangle.
 
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