Local camera retailer

[Musicman]

Ah. That thing was your fault, was it?

I nearly qualified my statement because i thought someone might say that

This was before that;, it was a very simple static site. They got someone else to do the horribly slow thing you are remembering.

 

[DemiLion]

You obviously know exactly what I was talking about then!!

 

[jamesev]

Now they have mobile phones - small, convenient, always with them, can do stills and videos to be sent immediately to fond relatives - who needs a camera?

The difference nowadays is between a photo that is good and a photo that will get you likes and content. Its just saturated now

 

[Faldrax]

I've said this before in relation to camera shops: if there was genuine competition between them for your dollars then fewer people would shop online. You only have to look at Camera Price Buster to see that they don't really compete.

Or you can read it another way - they DO compete - in as much as they all drop their prices to match whoever is prepared to take the least profit.
Which looks the same (externally) as all not competing and agreeing to a fixed price - so there's no way (unless someone who is actually involved in setting prices at a camera retailer decides to comment) to know which is the case.

 

[Musicman]

Or you can read it another way - they DO compete - in as much as they all drop their prices to match whoever is prepared to take the least profit.
Which looks the same (externally) as all not competing and agreeing to a fixed price - so there's no way (unless someone who is actually involved in setting prices at a camera retailer decides to comment) to know which is the case.

I can talk about a similar market which I used to work in, computer retail, specifically Apple computers.

Back in the 1980s, (the limited number of) Apple resellers made healthy gross margins in the order of 30%.

By the early 90s, when I entered the industry at a newer mail order Apple reseller, we were looking for 12 to 15%, which drifted downward over the course of the next few years.

Skip forward to the turn of the millennium when I had moved to a distributor (I knew what the wholesale prices were and Apple certainly did not do volume discounts) many of the retail competition were clearly working on margins as low as 2.5%. On a £1000 iMac sale they were making £25, hoping to make things up in volume and accessories sales accompanying à new computer (which tended to be more profitable).

To anyone outside, the £25 difference between them and another company selling the computer for £1025 might appear nearly trivial, but that was a doubling of the profit to be made. Equally, another retailer offering the iMac for £995 was losing 20% of their gross margin versus the first,*

Flipping through the ads in MacUser, you might imagine it was almost a cartel conspiring to keep prices high, when in fact it was quite the opposite.

* none of this probably stopped customers asking for ’the best price’ expecting to be able to get £100 or more off the sticker price, which would have been a loss for the retailer.