Retail metldown

[George Ebersole]

So, a few months back I was scoping out some lenses, or trying to, and I noticed that nearly all the camera stores in the Bay Area (where I live) have vanished. There's like maybe a half dozen or so, including one mom and pop shop sort of near where I used to live.

 

I keep hearing the economy is okay, but then I see all the store closures, and if stores are going out of business, then how come I can't clearance prices on massive lenses?

 

In this video the guy walks through a Payless Shoe store that's barely hanging on, and talks about the retail meltdown.

 

 

 

The theory being that retail was overbuilt in the 90s, and now that the economy is slowing down, people (shoppers and retailers) are discovering that they don't need lots of the same stores all over the place. Result; store closures.

 

I was just curious if anybody here had an opinion on this.

[Max Field]

Internet's practically destroyed specialty retail stores like camera gear. Every specialty store owner guy I talk to says the internet screwed up their business.

[Satsuki Murashige]

It's impossible to compete with Amazon and eBay when you can order anything you like there and have it delivered to your door without leaving your house.

 

What I miss about the old photo shops are the collections of old cameras and lenses. And the shop staff who were often quite knowledgeable and passionate about film and photography. They would also often be able to fix your old mechanical cameras for you. I used to spend a fair bit of time at a few of them in my student days.

[George Ebersole]

Yeah, certainly e-commerce has put a crimp in a lot of things. But people still need to buy washers, dryers, big ticket items in general, or non-media items, and that's a little confusing to me. I still buy clothes in stores.

 

Satsuki, I don't know if you're a bay area native or not, but from the 70s up to maybe 8 years ago or so, it was like you couldn't walk a few blocks anywhere on the peninsula without some store carrying some kind of camera gear. It was mostly consumer stuff, but in addition to those places there used to be quite a few camera stores, and now it's I have to drive either a half hour into the city, or an hour south to Keeble and Shcucatts to get to a serious camera store. That never used to be the case.

 

Oh well. I guess I'm just waxing poetic.

[Satsuki Murashige]

A lot of people these days buy large appliances and either pick them up at a box store like Best Buy or have them delivered directly.

 

I grew up in San Francisco, so my local camera shops were Adolf Gassers and Action Camera. Both no longer in business as of this year. Action Camera serviced my SLR and Super 8 cameras and also mailed out my Super 8 film for processing. My local still photo lab, Light Waves, closed at the beginning of the year. And of course our only local motion picture lab Monaco closed years ago. It has not been a good decade for small local film and photography businesses up here...

[George Ebersole]

Wow, I didn't know Monaco was gone. That's major.

 

Last year I found out that Gassers off Geary had shut down a long time ago, so I tried to hit the store downtown off 2nd, but you can't get a parking there for the life of you because of the Salesforce construction. So I gave up. But now they're really gone, huh? Wow.. Incredible.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Monaco closed maybe 8 years ago or so. After they shut down the lab, they kept the telecine bays open a bit longer but they were still standard def so people went to Spypost instead because they had a Spirit Datacine. Spypost is now also gone as of this year. I don't think there are any motion picture film scanning services left in the Bay Area.

 

Lightwaves was also nearby, right next to the old Lee Utterbach rental house on Russ St, btwn 6th and 7th St.

 

Gassers on Geary has been closed since the late 90s/early 2000s. My folks had an ice cream shop a few blocks away, so I was there from time to time. Their 2nd St location catered to the nearby Academy of Art campuses so they stayed in business much longer. But they just closed a month or two ago. B&H and Adrorama did for them what Amazon did to other small mom & pop shops.

[Keith Walters]

I suspect that the main problem is simply that, as with a lot of other retail markets, it was the turnover of mass-market consumer gear that allowed these places to stock more professional items, pretty much as a sideline. The problem now is, most consumers who wanted a "better" camera have already got one, and they can't see any particular need to upgrade, plus the cameras you get in phones are pretty damned good now, and it's all a lot of people ever use.

Even with phones, it's getting harder and harder to find plausible reasons to upgrade those too, apart from "accidents".

[George Ebersole]

Well, it seemed curious that with all the closures that prices weren't coming down on glass. Tech has brought down the price of some cameras, but all the support gear is till relatively expensive. Whatever.

 

Every time the economy adjusts I can't seem to find a bargain, no matter what.

 

I do have to say that way back in the 1990s it did seem like there was just rampant consumerism almost for the sake of it. It's like everyone was buying everything for the sake of it. Then we had Enron, the banking crisis, and a couple of other economic crises.

 

Every-time I tried pricing a camera package the prices always stayed the same, so I bought some used gear instead back then. Now my big choice was deciding whether to choose an acquisition or legacy format, so I went for the middle ground with a low end DSLR ... but lenses are still pricey like they were 20+ years ago. Oh well.

 

At least I don't have to spend thousands on editing software anymore.