Biggest thing killing dive shops?

[mdb]

Well, I can tell you why I stopped going into my LDS for a time many years ago.
. Maybe we'll see the old owner of the LDS at a club meeting!

I don't think you will see "the old owner of the LDS at a club meeting"

I do hope the new owner in Santa Rosa succeeds.

North Coast diving does need a decent SCUBA store.

A rugged,and very beautiful coast.

 

[DanBMW]

I have not read any of the previous comments except for the first page, (I apologize if this has already been said) but in my opinion, it's simple demographics. The "Baby Boomers" were the ones to create the demand and their numbers are diminishing.. Same with other simular activities like Skydiving.... Just a fact of life..

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I have not read any of the previous comments except for the first page, (I apologize if this has already been said) but in my opinion, it's simple demographics. The "Baby Boomers" were the ones to create the demand and their numbers are diminishing.. Same with other simular activities like Skydiving.... Just a fact of life..

Maybe similar to Harley Davidson's problems?

 

[Steve_C]

Another factor is that a lot go into the business because they like diving. Not because they see a great location, love running a business, and have a good business plan and see how to make a living wage out of it. Many years ago a friend of mine went from working for a large national gas company to running a gas station in Chicago that was very successful. He said most stations did not do well because they were not trained business men. His rules were simple. You did not stock anything that would not sell within a week. You did not hire any help, including your best friends son, unless you really need help. You did not always do what the company wanted unless it was good for you too. (Like they wanted him to drop his prices, but not what he was paying for his gas inventory) Etc.

What I hear in this thread is a lot of folks who want the LDS to have an impossible business model. Charge low prices. Carry a big inventory of everything they might want one day, always have knowledgable staff ready to quickly help them., etc. Just one thing that they are overlooking is that many businesses, including LDS, operate at least partly on loans. Some of that inventory is bought on loans of some form. That means that a piece of inventory that sits there for 4 months before it is bought is not just using space, but also costing them money.

Also, the economics is such that most LDS cannot afford a store in a good location so there is very little walk by business. You have to be looking for them. My area had 5 LDS. All but one were in what I would consider out of the way, little struggling areas. The one exception appeared to be doing it all right, with a very active dive club, etc. but then when the owner suddenly died, it closed because it turned out the finances were not going well.

As for the comment about branching out what you sell, it has to also be something that can survive in a suboptimal location. If I own a big store that sells boating equipment, dive equipment, fishing equipment, and I see that I am getting much less return on my dive equipment investment, guess what area shrinks?

 

[Saicho]

As a new diver, I recognized the potential value and tried to support my LDS, but they did everything possible to dissiuade me from wanting to step foot inside again. If I hadn’t started researching on Scubaboard prior to our OW class, I can’t imagine what horrors of kit/skills I’d have. They ran the whole gamut of poor instruction (all knees on bottom, rushed bare minimum skills, no gear advice, no tank change on 1 of the OW dives, berating students), bad attitude (sarcastic “what kinda diving are YOU doing?” when I (newb) brought in a reg with 5’ hose for overhaul (he’d never seen one before??), trying to sell me dusty floor display octo at inflated price with no initial calibration), weak gear selection (1 back inflate BCD in store, no BP/Ws, gimmicky and split fins heavily pushed, everything not in stock special ordered w/ no returns) and blatantly false advice (“backplates need constant adjustment and can’t be removed in water”, “15lbs of lift is all you ever need in a BCD” - cold Cali waters/7mm semidry…. sure buddy). We tried one local dive with them and it was a debacle as well

I’ve found others in the area with better gear and better quality instruction (props to Diver Dan’s!) but I’m sure many others have been turned off to diving or wound up fleeced into buying subpar expensive gear from these clowns

When consumers can more easily comparison shop online and educate themselves rather than relying solely on the local “experts”, weak operations like this will be left with only the least dedicated/educated customers - not an ideal recipe for continued success

 

[KenGordon]

Aside from the part where you have to keep them somewhere. As long as you have a permanent club member whose wife doesn't mind that junk in her garage...

Some of the clubs in cheaper areas have actual premises. Here in London we have an equipment officer whose wife is understanding about the junk in her garage We also store some stuff at the pool. That pool costs nearly £100/week and so about £5k/year.

The thing a club enables is taking the financial risk of booking a boat. At £600/day I am not going to take the risk personally that I will find 11 other people who want to dive that day. A club can do that. If the boat is not full then the members paying their subs are subsidising the diving, but they could have taken their chance to dive.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

@Saicho, what you’re describing is a shop selling the highest profit margin items by employees that get paid very little and know very little, and the training done in a very abreviated fashion to save man hours, time is money.
This is the typical life support model. This is what happens when dive shops don’t pay attention for the last 20 years because they “ know it all”, and the silly internet is a just a phase and a “gimmick”, only the DIR nerd types buy gear there.
OK whatever, but trends are changing, and many or most LDS’s missed the bus. Not everybody want’s poodle jackets, split fins, doing skills on knees, and paying 10% over full retail for it.
A lot of people know better now.

 

[boulderjohn]

what you’re describing is a shop selling the highest profit margin items by employees that get paid very little, and the taining done in a very abteviated fashion to save man hours, time is money.[/USER]

In my experience working for two different shops, some of this is very true and some of it is not.

1. I left my first dive shop for several reasons, one of which was a change in the agency they were using, a change that included using that agency's sales techniques. Those sales techniques did indeed include steering customers toward a specific set of equipment, with each part of that set chosen for its profit margin. Instructors were required to purchase those specific items (at a discount) and use them for all instruction, and they were required to tell students they had chosen those items because they were the very best in existence.

2. Most of the people minding the floor for the shops I have worked for have been people desperate for a job and willing to work at a very low wage. One of those people, one of the experts who will guide you in your purchases, called me to tell me my order of scuba tanks had come in. When I came in to get them, he asked me what manner of tanks I had purchased. They sure looked strange, with their rounded bottoms and all, and they sure were heavy. those were the first steel tanks he had ever seen, and he had not known they existed before that.

3. In all the training I have done for two shops, training time was not an issue. I experienced two methods of paying training staff--by the number of students and by the job being performed. It never mattered how long you took to get the job done. In one case, the shop owned the pool, so pool time didn't matter. In the other, the shop rented pool time, but that time was ample for the job. the time required for the OW dives did not matter, either.

 

[taimen]

I had an OWD experience with a LDS, who btw train in bp/w configuration and seem quite educated in many issues. Our instructor was their tech instructor who is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor too.
We got heavily overweighted, kneeling on the bottom of the pool, harnesses unadjusted and when we asked questions, we were always told that such things are covered during open water dives or advanced course.
2 out of 4 quit before open water dives, and 1 decided to finish the course elsewhere during a vacation.
We had excellent equipment and a small group, so giving good instruction would not have been an extra expense. We were not pushed to buy equipment either, but probably only one of us became a diver.
Pure ignorance.

 

[KenGordon]

So, I think it is very possible that scuba manufacturers will start selling direct to the public, and if they do it at discounted prices, then that will have a dramatic impact on ALL dive equipment dealers.

APD (maker of the most popular rebreather and the Buddy Commando BCD) have started selling direct rather than via shops.