Non-Scientific SCUBA Study

[TSandM]

I'm confused on the assertion that scuba is expensive. The initial investment is a bit pricey -- especially if you don't know what to shop for -- but it's not a huge expense.

Yeah, everything's relative. My other sport is dressage, and riding lessons run $60 to $100 an hour (or far more, with visiting clinicians -- up to $300!). Buying a very low level horse will run a minimum of $5K, and board in our area runs $500 to $1500 a month. And one hasn't even begun to consider shoes, vet bills, and the like! Yet there are a lot of riders, and a lot of trainers (even very bad ones) who make a reasonable living teaching riding and training horses. People simply set their priorities.

Diving has an up-front cost, but then, if you live where you have access to shore diving, it becomes pretty darned inexpensive. There aren't too many things you can do that will keep you busy for an entire day, with your friends, for $20!

 

[Doc]

....A really cool dive show on cable channels that educates people about the underwater world. Every week going to historical wrecks or chasing elusive animals and featuring dive staffs from around the globe... maybe even dive vacationers who happen to be on site when filming is going on...... Making it more appealing - DEMA must promote not with words - but with a real-life TV series that is innovative and cool.

I think Richie and John tried that.

Maybe if DEMA got after it, that could be a real success!

Manufacturers must lower pricing to dealers to allow more reasonable margins. Stop the gouging. We all know a wetsuit can be made for $10 so stop charging the retailer $100 for it and expecting them to charge $180. A $10 wetsuit with a 300% mark-up should cost the retailer $40 and the consumer $68. Current price structure is destroying the industry

Seems to be in-line with current business management rules being considered by the Komittee for Socialism. Maybe we should have this rule applied to everything else- think of how it would fix our economy. Let's start with the automotive industry.

 

[2 Big 2 Fail]

Yep. A horse is worse than a boat. The boat is just a hole in the water into which you shovel money. The horse is just as big a money hole, but what comes out the other end isn't something you have to deal with in a boat. But I wouldn't call scuba expensive. I would (and have) put perhaps twice the cost of my pretty decent scuba gear into a mid-level amateur radio HF rig, small tower, antenna and accessories. And they probably have comparable useful working lives. My kayak cost about what my scuba gear cost. I know deer hunters who every year spend more than my scuba gear and local diving costs combined. I measure expense by how many uses you get out of something for the money. Scuba gear is pretty dang cheap by that measure, but only if you use it a good bit. For those people who aren't all that interested and won't go diving very often, it is indeed expensive. Thus their survey answer.

The problem with interpreting a survey like this one is that you're recording what people say are their reasons. But "too expensive" likely really means I'm not interested enough. "Don't have time" also likely means I'm not interested enough to spend time doing it. And anyone who gave it up on account of a shop experience wasn't much into it to begin with.

A dive shop is inevitably, in areas other than diving hot spots, a marginal business. Like a ski shop or golf shop, its potential customer base is a small segment of the population and an all-or-nothing segment. I mean there are no "semi-divers" who are going to spend money there without actually being divers. Not the way a camera shop (a near extinct beast for other reasons) could sell film and processing to granny, as well as high-end stuff to real photographers. I suspect that if there is a true and geographically consistent decline in dive shop numbers, it is a falling back from an inflated situation where there was lots of money floating around, and it might be time to thin the herd. Hard economic times hit at every level. Divers defer new purchases. Dive vacations get foregone, of maybe the option of buying a travel BC is passed over.

Obviously, someone who has only one shop in their area is going to lament its passing. But I look at some places with multiple shops and think about what a great shop could be had if there were only one or two. I'd rather deal with one well stocked and relaxed shop than a bunch of struggling and desperate operations. No doubt some shops that were just squeaking by lost out to online retailers. Too bad about their unworkable business model in today's environment. But I used to be able to buy shoes and clothes at good prices on the square of this small town, too. No more. That means I wouldn't try to make a go of a small town clothing or shoe store under the traditional model. It no longer works.

Now it would sure be nice if the LDS would sell gear at LeisurePro prices, but that's not going to happen much. The lack of economy of scale, the brick and mortar overhead, the cost of employees idling when there are no customers, and the not inconsiderable cost of maintaining the inventory make that mostly impossible. If five shops can't stay open under the business plan, maybe one or two shops can and should.

And it's a fallacy to think it's unreasonable for a piece of gear to retail for ten or twenty times the cost of manufacturing. There's no manufacturing without the manufacturer selling it for more than it cost to make. There's no distribution to branding companies without profit for the distributor, over and above distributor staff, overhead, and shipping. And there's no branding company without profit over and above staff (salespersons' percentages), shipping, not inconsiderable advertising, and, in this kind of product, heavy insurance and legal. And the retailer still needs to make money, even after paying interest on inventory money so the counter kickers can kill Saturday morning in the shop. Like CocaCola, it costs almost nothing to make but a great deal to make it available to the individual customer.

Can a wetsuit make it to the end user for the proposed $68. Sure. TommyD does it. Simple, basic wetsuit, okay quality. I expect he bought it for about $30. But TommyD occupies a place in the distribution stream otherwise occupied by the brander who sells to the LDS. As a local retail product, then, the same suit has to be something like $150 for the LDS to come out okay, and that's about what you'd expect to pay for that quality.

 

[DennisS]

The future of diving in the United States


The industry is dying a slow and painful death... and here is why...



Who out there has what it takes to fix it? Is it you?

Why fix it if it isn't broke? I started diving 35 years ago and the industry was fine back then. There were a lot fewer divers and it was unusual to run into other divers when doing beach dives. Today there are groups suiting up in a lot of the beach parking lots that used to have very few divers. There are quarries and south florida spots that have large dive populations. They actually get in each others way.

There are now liveaboard boats that take people to places only yachties and scientific expeditions had access to. Every Island with a reef has an active dive resort. Look at cave diving, there was a small community of cavers, today it is practically main stream diving. Rebreathers were once very exotic, today there is a good size community that supports them. People that are interested in diving will find it and find their niche. There are more niches being serviced than ever before. Why do divers need more divers diving?

People that are interested in the oceans will find diving and use it as a tool to explore. People interested in adventure sports will find it and move on to the next thrill. Promoting it to people who don't really have an interest in it, to sell goods and instruction doesn't do anything for the average diver. They will try it for a year or two and the gear will end up sitting in the garage. Lots and lots of divers shouldn't be a goal of the dive industry. Finding niches and filling them with innovative equipment is a much better situation for the diver.

 

[sled600]

This is a very interesting discussion.
As a guy that got into diving at 49 years old because he had wanted to for 35 years...I watched Sea Hunt Re-runs. Jaques Cousteau specials..I loved it when Ranger Ricks of Flipper donned his doubles and blew bubbles....I always said...I am gonna do that someday!!!

Then...Work, Marriage, Kids, Bills, day to day life got diving out of my mind.
would a cool show showing regular people (like me) diving all day with friends and family for $20 (great line TS&M - kudos) have helped - Probably. Anything that can be done to get the reality and the practicality of our sport out in the public will help our sport attract people.

It isn't expensive in the grand scheme. once you have the gear diving and maintaining that gear is cheap.

I was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia last winter. Walking through a shopping mall was a table with pretty ocean pictures behind it...The people at the table worked for an LDS....7 of my 10 collegues signed up for a discover scuba and were diving in the Red Sea the next morning... Me and another O/W collegue were diving while they were learning and getting a quick tour of a reef. 3 of them went home and got O/W certs.

The fact that there are 3 new divers simply because they saw pretty pictures and talked to a couple of Saudi dive instructors in a shopping mall says something about marketing.

A Local LDS doesn't have a huge advertising budget. A Group of them can get the word out, though.

I love this sport! I am still a rookie of 75 dives and 18 months Learning every dive!

Thanks!

 

[Diver0001]

I wouldn't say that the dive industry is going downhill at all. The current situation of shops closing is not indicative of that......we're in a depression, and most of them shouldn't have opened in the first place! Too many shops, too little customers........hmmm......who'da thunk they'd go out of business?


...snip...

Very true. The economy is a a harsh master and part of the game is that badly run businesses will be weeded out and "eliminated" in the natural course of events freeing up that labour for other purposes. That's how the economy is supposed to work and how it *does* work (thankfully) in many cases.

While I don't want to insult Ken or "Off the Wall" it does seem upfront that this is a business that doesn't have the leadership, optimism and energy to make a go of it in the current economic environment. That's unfortunate for them on the short term but none-the-less a function of how the market works. But let's be clear. When 14% of the target market indicate some interest (when one would normally be happy with 1.5%) and this "mere" 14% causes management to despair then one can easily conclude that the failings of "Off the Wall" are no less the fault of "Dema" or "Nintendo" than the fact that my neighbors are not at fault for the fact that my dishes don't find their own way into the dishwasher.

I know that sounds harsh but by his own admission, "Off the Wall" exists in a market that should, with proper management, be able to attract more than enough customers to keep the business healthy..... even hectic. The fact that this does not seem to be happening and that (worrisomely) management would appear to want to place blame outside of its own sphere of control says more about "Off the Wall" than it does about the market, "Dema". "Nintendo" or the general state of health of the "average" American.

At least, that's how I read it.

R..

 

[mdb]

Diver0001:

You have it about right. A failed retailer starts a negative thread blaming everyone but himself.

We have a great sport that appeals to all age groups. Diving is a great family activity. Weekend diving sure helped when our sons were in the teen years.

Properly managed stores are doing OK and will do even better in the future. The weak, with a bad business model and a negative attitude are failing, and will continue to do so,that is true. Such is life.

More power to the optimistic and the positive. Diving has a lot of such positive people. Hard to be on a dive boat or dive trip without meeting new friends and having fun.

 

[Scott]

I know that sounds harsh but by his own admission, "Off the Wall" exists in a market that should, with proper management, be able to attract more than enough customers to keep the business healthy..... even hectic. The fact that this does not seem to be happening and that (worrisomely) management would appear to want to place blame outside of its own sphere of control says more about "Off the Wall" than it does about the market, "Dema". "Nintendo" or the general state of health of the "average" American.

At least, that's how I read it.

R..

I like the book you are reading.

The line item that really caught my attention was the reasoning that the 14% did not get involved in classes.

4. If you did, what about the inquiry failed to sway you to sign up for a class?
Arrogance of shop owner / employee - 2
Couldn't answer my questions - 2
Felt Rushed into decision - 3

Whether those seven went to the same store or seven different stores, the failure to sign up is placed squarely on the 'attitude' of the LDS themselves.

The last question told me the most. You can't even give diving away for free.

Not if you are an arrogant shop owner/ employee, who can not answer questions and will not give your customer the time they need because you are to busy.

 

[scubamarketing]

In my view, there is no shop between Portland and San Francisco which can offer the value we do.

Next time you're on the road, stop in Eugene, you might be surprised

$200 fins, $100 masks, $50 snorkels, $500 regs, computers and BCD's... and my experience is that local diving is down played in favor of expensive, exotic "destination" diving. Don't want to buy our "package" or sign up for another course? Well, I think there's an old piece of paper on the corkboard over there we call a buddy list (don't know really as none of our staffs names are on it).

This still comes down to the LDS. I've seen two stores in two markets that don't have the best, most accessible diving, yet the LDS creates a worthwhile dive club that keeps people diving at least every month. As a result, their exotic trips sell out quickly, people buy more gear and take more classes. AND they tell their friends about it, which brings in more new people.

I'm confused on the assertion that scuba is expensive. The initial investment is a bit pricey -- especially if you don't know what to shop for -- but it's not a huge expense.

I spend about $2000 a year on myself on scuba related stuff. I do 80 or so dives a year for fun. Both numbers ignore travel dives. If I weren't also doing instruction I'd dive more, but I'd also spend less). So I spend about $25 a dive. I could easily lower my costs significantly by not buying new gear, and staying away from some toy collecting that I tend to do.

But still, $25 a dive is pretty dang cheap. It is about the same as 9 holes of golf without club rental.

Yes a regulator costs some money up-front. But it's not like you can only use it for a year.

In my area, snow sports are one of the biggest competitors. I'm a skier and snowboarder, so I can personally verify expenses.

I just checked LP and for a complete setup, you can get it all for less than a grand. Sure, not top of the line, but decent. Tank rental around here is in the $8-12 range, $4-8 for fills if you have your own tanks. So let's say you want to be aggressive and do 4 dives in a day, you're looking at $16-48.

Looking at skiing, for a basic package of skis, boots, bindings and poles, it's about $450. Decent jacket $200, pants $200, gloves $100, goggles $80, helmet $100, thermals $100. So our total is now $1230, which is more than the scuba setup. My local ski resorts cost $70 for a day pass. So I paid MORE for the equipment and I pay MORE for a day's worth of activities, plus my local mountains are always packed and noisy, whereas underwater is relaxing yet exciting.

When I point that out to my local adventure sport participants (and I can do it with golf, mountain biking and camping too), they suddenly realize that SCUBA isn't grossly overpriced.

 

[mdb]

SCUBA is, and always has been, a great value.

Weightless, floating in a fantasy U/W world, something most will never experience. It never fails to help me relax and live strictly in the moment.

I have been diving around the globe-not enough by any means-still lots to see and do.

My favorite diving is still here in the Kelp forests of California. A three day boat trip out of SB or a nice day @ Pt. Lobos always changes my mood and puts it all on reset.