Is ScubaBoard against local dive shops?

[mdb]

The days of restricted dealership are rapidly coming to a close. ScubaPro, once one of the most restricted, recently Authorized, Leisure Pro, Scuba.com, Scubatoys, etc. as fully authorized dealers for in store and online sales. New divers, potential divers, old divers will goggle and compare. If the local store has the product in stock and will meet the online price they will do OK. Those stores who used: "They are not authorized Dealers" now will have to modify their approach.

 

[BVickery]

In any business genre, one needs to adapt to the times or risk being left in the dust. The LDS needs to adapt in how they operate/price things to survive. I'm kind of lucky in that I have about 4 or so dive shops in the general vicinity. Only 1 of them has an online presence that can be seen as one of the 'bigger' presences in the diving community. The closest LDS actually figured out a way to increase his business by teaming up with a charter boat captain and offering weekend dive trips but w/o the travel. The thing that impressed me is he studied what the other shops/charters were doing and found a BIG niche that none were catering to at the moment - normal OW divers. Since some of the sites were in the 60+ aspect, he wasn't just going to let them dive them by themself, he was just going to have him and a DM guide them down so they can then enjoy the off shore diving. NONE of the others do this w/o having to pay an extra on top of it all.

---------- Post added at 03:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:46 PM ----------

The days of restricted dealership are rapidly coming to a close. ScubaPro, once one of the most restricted recently Authorized, Leisure Pro, Scuba.com, Scubatoys, etc. as fully authorized dealers for online sales. New divers, potential divers, old divers will goggle and compare. If the local store has the product and will meet the price they will do OK. Those stores who used: "They are not authorized Dealers" now will have to modify their approach.

My LDS parent company is now a SP dealer, but the local shop isn't. I was talking to him and he didn't mind, he actually said he does a ton of maintenance on the MK25 and as long as he can do that, he says he is happy about it.

 

[Bubbletrubble]

A quick observation on this from when I was a new diver:

I was just finishing up my PADI advanced course a couple of years ago when I walked into the dive shop that I was frequenting at the time and saw their technician servicing a set of regulators. After putting everything back together he had a little pile of parts from the parts kits sitting there and he said:

"Where do we get these regs and parts? IKEA? They always have more parts then go in the regulator, or they don't go together the way the manual says!"

It was at that very moment that I realized that just because it is a LDS, does not mean that you should trust the guy that works there to count sand on a beach... Which is why I switched regs and now service my own.

@nielsent: I understand what you were trying to illustrate with your example. It's a good point. Not every dive shop-associated reg tech is competent. However, there is some truth to what you heard the reg tech say. If you perform enough overhauls on various regs, you'll realize that manufacturers, for simplicity's sake, may offer one "universal" overhaul kit for all its first or second stages. As the reg designs change over the years, it may be necessary to include specially-sized o-rings which are only used in certain models of regulators within a manufacturer's reg offerings. This explains how a competent reg tech could end up with a few extra parts/o-rings after performing an overhaul.

There may also exist slightly better ways of doing certain steps of the overhaul vs. how it is described in the servicing manual. It's possible that such deviations from the manual are discussed/taught in an "official" reg servicing course by the manufacturer.

The reg tech may also have been joking around a little with the Ikea comment. A dry sense of humor can be difficult to recognize sometimes.