In the face of economic disaster brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenge of delivering public safety while trying to avoid killing off business we still see a continued downturn in the photographic retail space.

It’s easy to blame the downturn on the virus and while not having stores open has definitely had a negative impact, it’s not the root cause of the problem so while some sellers want to blame things on the virus, this is disingenuous.  The real problem is the industry and the retailer response to it.

More pictures are taken in one day today than were made in the history of film based photography.  This is not news, or even interesting.  The vast majority are not made images, and most barely would qualify as an intentional snapshot.  While self-isolation should have put the bullet to the head of selfies it has not, even though the data tells us that not even the selfie takers spend very much (less than 1%) looking at selfies after the fact.  For the most part, they are used to make posts on social media that no one else looks at either.

So rather than go down the road of another rant against this form of malignant narcissism, let’s look at the how and why of picture taking in the last year of the second decade of the 21st century.

The device most used to take picture today is the smartphone.  It is very easy to use.  It’s also the device that has moved farthest and fastest to make taking pictures easier and with a higher keep ratio than any other type of image capture device.  The smartphone is now the number one platform for non-broadcast video as well.  This is not because the results are particularly good.  People use smartphones because the images and videos are acceptable, the device is always with them, and the ease of use is the best that there is.

For the photographic industry this is a huge problem.

No one using a smartphone for stills or video needs a camera store.  Ever.  Sure, a camera store can have a few racks of smartphone accessories for the purpose of picture taking.  So does Walmart.  And the local grocery store.  Add in the behemoth that is Amazon, that until the virus delivered products in a couple of days at the lowest price around and with the highest level of convenience, and this puts paid to the lack of need of the camera store.

In the old days, and for serious photographers, you could go into a camera store and find people who loved and knew photography and who would spend the time with you to help you learn something, with the hope that you would then spend your money in their store so they could earn some level of gross margin.

Then those people starting retiring and workers in stores because mostly part-time people with no benefits and no career aspirations because they were cheaper, and more disposable to the retailer.  I know of one retailer that stated outright that they wanted staff who were personally likeable more than they wanted photographic knowledge.  That particular retailer put the gun to their own head and are reaping precisely what they sowed.  

I understand this because if most pictures are taken with smartphones, then a knowledgeable staff becomes unnecessary.  So then, how to compete.  Then it comes to price and delivery.

Walk into most camera stores that remain and their inventory is mostly clones of good equipment made in Asia because it delivers margins of 400% instead of 25%.  Quality equipment is not in stock, but available for special order, where the buyer has the privilege to pay up front and then wait around for the retailer to get an order in place and for it to arrive.  Distributors want minimum orders to provide the largest discounts, and retailers are terrified of getting stuck with inventory because the shelf life before replacement with a new model is so short.  That really nothing new of significance to image quality has happened in cameras for a very long time appears immaterial.  Meet the new camera, same as the old camera, if I may paraphrase Pete Townsend.

Find a house brand and you will find a piece of junk, worth far less than what you pay for it.  A Manfrotto super clamp might have 30% margin at street price.  The house brand clone of the same Manfrotto super clamp, made in China, where there is no such thing as intellectual property, will sell in the camera store for a few dollars less but contribute 300% margin.  Sounds good for the camera store?  It would if buyer’s did not shop around and discover the same product under one of a hundred names for ⅓ to ¼ the sell price of the original Manfrotto.  A pro, or serious amateur will buy Manfrotto but the rest of the buyers are not worried about lifecycle, they want the cheapest thing, right freaking now.  One does not have to like this fact, but it remains a fact.

This is another dart to the heart of the camera store.  They make presentations to themselves about their value add that warrants higher margins, when they actually do not deliver such value any more.  Why would you, or I, for that matter spend $40 in a camera store for a Chinese made white metal clamp when I can get a six pack of the same thing on Amazon for $40?  Buyers won’t because there is no return to them for that extra cost.

We see retailers closing stores because those stores cannot generate enough profit to stay open.  That is a truth.  The industry changed years ago, and the retailers lied to themselves that they would not be impacted.  In the years when picture takers left traditional cameras by rocket sled, retailers bought up other stores or opened in new markets on nothing but hope and self-delusion.  Why was it so easy to buy up other stores?  Because they were already dead or dying.

Manufacturers worked to protect themselves with price fixing.  Price fixing is supposedly illegal but makers get around it with a scam called MAP.  This stands for Minimum Advertised Price.  You cannot place an ad online for less than MAP but if you had a brick and mortar store and someone actually tried to negotiate a better price, sellers could sell for less than MAP.  Some makers actually invoked reward systems for retailers to tell on each other if one went against MAP.  This happened, but none of those retailers got cut off because they were doing volume and the manufacturer’s cost to the retailer did not change if the retailer chose to take lower margin.  Thus those who followed MAP lost sales volume, while retaining low margins, and those who did not, suffered no penalty of “breaking the law” because the “law maker” did not care.

Some retailers then demanded government funding to sustain them because their business was off.  Why should a taxpayer be called upon to support a business that cannot be run successfully?  What talent does government have in the successful running of any business?  Government cannot run itself, let alone a business that only survives by making more in selling than it costs to operate.

There are camera stores who are claiming to be moving away from brick and mortar to online selling.  This is akin to volunteering to go to war in an uphill battle against a superior enemy in winter.  Can any other retailer beat B&H or Adorama at a game where the established leaders make the rules?  These businesses sell at low margins to the best of their ability, leveraging individual margin loss against gain by volume.  Find a product there that is not cheaper and not governed by MAP, and I will show you a product that does not sell and that will disappear.  They even get around MAP but selling white box products.  White box are real products by the same manufacturer sourced in a different country where the buy cost is lower than the native country.  Yes the end user loses the manufacturer warranty when buying white box, and the local distributor rails against white box sales, but nothing happens because the seller moves more product than their competitors.  No maker will cut off a seller moving tens of thousands of a product to favour a seller who “obeys” the rules but only sells a few hundred.  “But that’s not fair” some will exclaim.  Where was fair defined in the reseller agreement?

So these new participants in online selling do so in the face of established and well oiled competition without inventory, with the expectation that the customer will pay before many products are even ordered, with websites that are examples of poor execution, that use questionable delivery methods and cannot deliver in two weeks what Amazon or B&H could deliver in two days for the same or lower price.  What is the value to the customer?  Best price?  Nope.  Most best price offers have lots of fine print that excludes anything not in stock, anything not in the same packaging, anything that is identical but under a different brand (ie everything from China) and also excludes some online sellers (not in the same country or even Amazon as examples).  Thus the best price promise is so quantified as to be useless.  The best staff?  What staff?  No customer has visibility to the staff.  The best product knowledge?  What product knowledge?  Who is communicating in real time with the online customer, or is that no one?

A brick and mortar sales model does not work online, but some retailers think that it can and that they can command high margins for service left than what is delivered by competitors.  If you go into business trying to beat B&H at the game that they define, your odds are rather poor.  Where is the innovation in online selling?  There is none, it’s a race for lowest price, fastest delivery.  If you cannot compete on those terms, you have nothing to offer.

One could once find loyalty created between an individual seller and a customer inside the context of a camera store.  When the staff are all of vague competence, or compensated solely on gross margin and required to sell add-on warranties and other non-necessities to keep their jobs, there is no balance of value attained.  I am a professional photographer and videographer.  I am aware of a couple of professional sellers in vertical shops to whom I can approach for guidance and suggestions.  I know of no one left in most camera stores who know ⅛ th of the subject that I know, and I do not regard the ability to regurgitate manufacturer’s highly specious spec sheets as a value.  I can read those sheets myself and have the knowledge to know how much is utter bullshit.  These sellers do not know, and mostly don’t care so long as they hit their daily margin and add-on sales targets.  Loyalty is not to a store, but to a person.  When the person disappears, or gets replaced, the loyalty to the store does not immediately remain.  

A store manager who knows how many times the door opened relative to the number of transactions is important to the business, but if that manager is not on the floor demonstrating selling skill and customer relationship building that manager is of zero value to the customer.  Since the business without a customer is also a zero, the leadership should realize this but choose not to do so.

I see some stored spending a lot of time and money to be socially relevant and socially respected.  How does this ephemeral relevancy and respect pay the rent, or the interest on goods purchased?   What extra is the customer willing to spend for this social awareness?  The proof is in the numbers, and the answer is infinitesimal.  For those without a science background that means a number accelerating to zero.

Who is the customer at this point?  It is not the casual picture taker or video maker using a smartphone. They neither need nor care about the camera store.  The customer is the diminishing number of customers willing to pay very high prices for technology that has not innovated in a very long time for a hobby that they enjoy but whose complexity frustrates them.  Why have so many people stopped buying cameras?  Because they have an alternative that does the job to their satisfaction, called the smartphone.  

One may then ask if camera stores in the traditional sense are on an incline to death, what about the photographic industry.  Recent data tells us of a drop in camera sales of 64% in one month this year.  Can this all be blamed on COVID-19.  Certainly, however such application of blame only fools the fool.  Camera prices have gone up substantially, well beyond inflation, in the last ten years.  Gear that has existed for tens of years that is now cheaper than every to make has not dropped in price, instead it has gone up in price.  To what value?  Better pictures?  Not at all.  More features?  Certainly but such things are features and do not make the user a better photographer or videographer?  Better build quality?  Not at all.  Innovation in approach?  Only if one spells innovation using only the letters q and v, so no, no real innovation.  Where smartphone makers have pushed the envelope, camera makers have crawled inside the old envelope and tell themselves that they are doing a great job.  Lying to oneself does not make it so.

The Camera Store as we knew it is already dead.  Any twitching that you see are the last galvanic responses of a corpse.

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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.