Beautifully written and absolutely true.A lot of divers have two piles of gear, the small pile that works, and the large pile of mistakes.
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Beautifully written and absolutely true.A lot of divers have two piles of gear, the small pile that works, and the large pile of mistakes.
A lot of divers have two piles of gear, the small pile that works, and the large pile of mistakes. One small pile is all you need.
Dive shops do their best work on hypochondriacs.Lot of ancillary discussions here. What the OP spent, when he's buying etc. is largely irrelevant to the discussion in my mind. It's his money, if he wants to spend it immediately that's his decision. I had the exact same problem with my LDS, the bottom line is while his prices may be able to compete with online retailers, his catalog most definitely cannot, and his refusal to accept that people may have different goals in their diving growth may be different than his was a major turnoff to me as a customer. Combine that with his and his staff's blatant and unapologetic scare tactics to get a sale is major turn off to me to ever send my dollars there. If you have to guilt or scare yourself business, you don't deserve to have a business, period. If you can't compete with selection or delivery from other (online) retailers, it's time for you to shut down the doors on sales of those goods. OP should not feel bad whatsoever if he ends up buying online.
As far treating your customers bad, guilt scare etc, I totally agree.
But to say that you should shut your doors because the manufacturer doesn't have any gear to send you really? You cannot get gear...... big difference between cannot and will not. Right now we have manufacturer delays in the base materials, some scuba gear factories cannot get the materials to make the gear because of COVID, then they have delays in manufacturering once they do have the materials. Then further delays in shipping.
All of this is the small business owners fault that they cannot get the products, are you serious?
I want to train with the gear that I will use going forward, as opposed to whatever gear the shop has in their rental pile.
Why do online retailers have equipment to send that arrives at the customer's door in a couple of days? Do they really tie up thousands and thousands and thousands in inventory? Or do they just have a better partnership with their distributor?
And yes, that's business... at least in my mind. If you can't compete, you adapt or close.
Is that really so wrong?
You have absolutely no diving experience.I want to train with the gear that I will use going forward, as opposed to whatever gear the shop has in their rental pile.
Why do online retailers have equipment to send that arrives at the customer's door in a couple of days? Do they really tie up thousands and thousands and thousands in inventory? Or do they just have a better partnership with their distributor?
And yes, that's business... at least in my mind. If you can't compete, you adapt or close.
Is that really so wrong?
It looks like this thread has morphed from being about the retail environment to a "why would a newbie buy gear for a sport he knows nothing about.".....
I'm in this situation. I'd rather use my own gear while I am training. It makes no sense to me to train on gear I don't intend to use after I'm trained.