6 ms·

I feel for you- I have a family member running a medical supply retail store, and the people who use it to showroom their online purchases and act like they've

by gedy 6y ago

I feel for you- I have a family member running a medical supply retail store, and the people who use it to showroom their online purchases and act like they've caught a shyster because of a 10-15% price difference is maddening. Amazon, etc doesn't walk people through models, usage, fitting, etc. Then folks pontificating about how they need to "innovate" in the face of huge corps selling less than they can buy wholesale..

trentnix 6y ago
Oh yeah, bike retailers have seen their fair share of exhortations to "innovate". And that's why some of them tried opening coffee shops or brewing beer or hiring consultants to help them create better merchandising to "reach female buyers that like to shop" and ways to spend your money with no return. Why manage one struggling business (your bike shop) when you can manage two struggling businesses (your bike shop and your coffee shop)! Really, retail has largely been gamed past the point of no return. "Win the Holidays", as Best Buy put it a few years ago. Consumers evangelize their hookup, not their service experience. Maybe bike consumers don't need the support and service the bike business traditionally offered. Camera stores are gone, but camera sales have never been better. Cameras are better and more accessible than ever before, too. Maybe the bike business will follow the same path. Time will tell. EDIT: Funny enough, cameras are still subject to MAP and it is generally enforced fiercely.
- hug 6y ago
  All camera sales are in steep decline year on year, assuming you’re ignoring smartphones. The compact camera market is essentially dead, no one is making DSLRs in the future, and the mirrorless market is shrinking.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    My anecdote must be then, at best, a few years old. But I am continually amazed at the quality of the cameras available both in my phone and in standalone cameras. Innovation continues even though the market has radically changed.
  - dbspin 6y ago
    This is absolutely untrue for video cameras - both DSLM's and larger 'cinema cameras' like the FX9 and C300 iii, let alone Arri and Red models. They're selling faster that they can be manufactured in many cases.
    - hug 6y ago
      It is 100% true for all CIPA members. Mirrorless sales are down. Unit price is up, but the market is contracting: https://www.dpreview.com/news/7282900211/cipa-s-latest-numbers-show-camera-production-sales-slashed-by-half-in-march https://www.dpreview.com/news/7282900211/cipa-s-latest-numbe... What I just said may not be true for Red or Arri, but you don’t walk into Joe’s Camera to buy an Arri, and for their high-end models they’re literally only available to rent for production anyway. Long lead times on new cameras is not indicative of high sales in a vacuum, just high sales relative to projected demand, which again is absurdly low.
      - dbspin 6y ago
        You're conflating video camera and digital camera sales. It'd be great to see sales numbers for all the major manufacturers, but Canon have in the last year launched five new cinema focused cameras (R5, R6, C70, C300 iii and C500 ii), Sony have launched three (A7sii, FX9, FX6). All of these (the ones that are currently available at least) appear - both from availability, and the frequency I see them on location - to be selling extremely well. As to your 'high end models' comment. That isn't remotely true. Arri make one camera, the Alexa 65, that isn't available for retail. Red make one line of cameras, the Red Ranger, that wasn't available but now is. They also make custom cameras for specific DOPs occasionally. But broadly speaking both manufacturers only make 'high end models' (only exception being the new Red Komodo pro-sumer crash cam), and they're all for sale (and doing extremely well).
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  I've never met an LBS that could service a bicycle on the time estimate they quote. And most people don't realize that quality bikes are worth their price, vs. the Huffy at Walmart, but that's all they can afford. So yeah, why manage one business destined to fail on its own when you can try to be a social hub? Look at Capital One with their "bank coffee shops". Look at how breweries have differentiated themselves. Bike shops are niche, like book shops are now, and will have to really offer a top-notch service and pricing experience to compete.
- krooj 6y ago
  The bike business is funny, right? It's one of those businesses where you really need to find your niche in order to succeed. If you think you're gonna survive off a franchise store or something in a strip mall, you will die. Some models that I've seen weather online retail are either going after a captive audience, such as commuters in a city, MTB shops here in Santa Cruz or they cater to super, super high end customers that are paying for an experience (La Biciletta/Blacksmith in Toronto). Lotta shops make up for retail on service as well, but yet again, that requires the captive audience. In regards to dirt cheap OEM parts from Europe, that's largely stopped. Most of those online retailers won't ship Shimano groupsets to NA anymore and while you can find good deals online, I tend to see them being sold from US-based companies. In any case, with the way manufacturers have shifted away from standards, being your own home mechanic has gotten prohibitively expensive, with the need for various presses and extraction tools, etc... I tend to see many more high-end factory bikes on the road than bespokes and forget doing your own suspension work on modern MTBs...
  - trentnix 6y ago
    In regards to dirt cheap OEM parts from Europe, that's largely stopped. That is excellent news for bike shops. I just hope it's not too little, too late. It kinda defeats the narrative from Shimano and others it was legally impossible to do so, though.
  - lhoff 6y ago
    The ironic thing about the dirt cheap OEM parts from europe ruining local business is, its happening in europe as well. If a local shop orders parts from lets say shimano it must be bought from the official shimano importer. All while the online shops import it themselves and undercut the prices by a lot. I once wanted to buy a new bearing for the crankset and my bike was already disassembled. So i went to the local shop to avoid waiting for shipment (was before next/same day delivery was a thing in germany). The price there was about 50 or 60€ while the online price was something in the 20th. I talked to the owner what the reason for that big of a difference and he showed me his official B2B catalogue. It was basically the price he asked for. So he wouldn't even make money out of it if I would have bought it there. He recommended to just buy it online which I then did.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  A secondary problem is that even if you offer the best, most trustworthy customer experience possible, people will naturally discount it because they will have the feeling you're just trying to steer them to more expensive/higher margin/higher kickback purchases. Shops sometimes say "Non-commissioned salesperson" to try to diffuse that belief, but I'm skeptical. I wonder if for major purchases, there'd be a market equivalent to the "independent fee-based investment advisor." Basically unbundle the service experience brick-and-mortar traditionally provided and let people buy it seperately. You'd pay a modest service charge up front and discuss with them what your needs are, and then they find you the right product and the cheapest/most reliable place to buy it. It comes with a service guarantee-- if you buy through their recommendation, they are responsible for negotiating warranty/service hassles. I could see spending a $20 fee to know I completely slam-dunked a $500 purchase, especially if they can regularly yield outcomes like "Our huge network of merchant data found you the bike/appliance/etc. you wanted at some tiny brick-and-mortar in Baltimore and it comes out $50 cheaper delivered than any retailer you'd consider locally." Brick-and-mortar retailers don't have to try to maintain an expensive sales and customer-service experience and convert to rack-em-high-sell-em-cheap warehouses, and no-service-required customers can skip the consultancy and go directly to them and still get a decent price. They "advisor" service would have to be explicitly independent and no-kickbacks for this to work... so I suspect what would happen is that it would build trust for a few years, then start undermining it by taking incentives to steer business.
  - achow 6y ago
    > Our huge network of merchant data found.. at some tiny brick-and-mortar in Baltimore and it comes out $50 cheaper Here is the crux: the 'supply chain' for gathering the data from all the tiny stores in small towns, who may not even have a retail system or may not be even connected, would be intractable.
    - splatzone 6y ago
      Use a call centre to contact 100 stores at once?
  - spicybright 6y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The bicycle industry has a problem in that prices on consummable parts have far outstripped the rate of inflation. There is no reason for decent chains, tires, and cassettes to cost $60+ when they were $30 20 years ago. Motorcycle parts are comparatively cheaper for just as much engineering rigor, far more material input, and lower available consumer base for North Am. It's all about the price gouging for the OEMs.
throwaway201103 6y ago
This is nothing new. In the 1980s I was into photography. The local camera shop sales guys were always complaining about the people who would come in, spend hours talking about and looking at gear, and then they would leave and order it from 47th Street Photo, or Adorama, or one of the other NYC mail order sellers.
- ghaff 6y ago
  True. Although in retrospect, I see a lot of those local stores as having a limited inventory of gear and all the incentive in the world to push that inventory. While I have a special place in my heart for things like indie bookstores, homebrew suppliers, etc. a lot of small local specialty shops really weren't all that great.
- jerrac 6y ago
  I'd like to see some of the stores become actual showrooms. You go in, get to handle the actual product. Then, if you decide to buy, do it there via the stores affiliate link. If not, you pay the store $N on your way out. That way the customer gets the price they want, and the store makes some money for letting them handle things.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Also, I'd happily pay the store to deal with any warranty issues. I just talk to the person of the store (whom I paid for that service), and they communicate with whoever they need to get the issue solved. In the meantime, they give me a replacement item. This service should be offered, at a higher price tag, even if I bought my product elsewhere, no questions asked.
    - zdw 6y ago
      This sounds a lot like the Apple physical stores - they'll sell and service any gear made by Apple. Also helps that Apple is vertically integrated and has tight control over it's supply chain and applies MAP very uniformly.
  - 6y ago
bsg75 6y ago
My observation in the years leading up to the online giants dominating some markets (electronics for example), was that retail stores that could adequately guide customers was rapidly declining. Medical supply is probably a different category, where expertise is more important than others. But in more common examples, when I would go to a store and already knew more about their product lines than the salespeople, the local price difference was a turnoff. I'm happy to pay a reasonable uplift if a vendor can educate, guide or support me as a customer. But when few of them can, I literally have no reason to patronize them. As fast shipping became an option, there was less and less reason to go to a showroom other than to independently look at a product person. In 2020, I don't even care about that, because return policies are liberal. My favorite case example is CircuitCity [1]: "In 2003, Circuit City converted to a single hourly pay structure in all stores, eliminating commissioned sales. Many previously commissioned sales associates were offered new positions as hourly "product specialists", while 3,900 salespeople were laid off, saving the company about $130 million per year. Many company insiders later revealed that they thought this was the most influential company decision that would ultimately lead to its demise." Lowering costs by eliminating qualified and experiences salespeople, attempting to become an expertise-less local storefront competing on price with businesses that have lower costs was a suicide move, and endemic of executives attempting to run companies based _purely_ on a bottom line, without actually understanding the market they are in. "Excel Excutives" in my words. On the other hand, I have begun doing more business with BestBuy this year. Not because they have changed their level of in store expertise, but because when I need something, they can compete with Amazon in some cases on a combination of price and convenience. I can find if their store has something, the quantity, and have it in hand with no more than drive time. In the work-from-mode many of us are in, this can be a big deal. Plus, I can get appliances from them with installation, and office furniture from their delivery services that is a bit of a gamble from Amazon, who so far is not as convenient for "big box" shipping. I hope BB continues what they are doing, because they seem to have figured out some of the variables to _adapt._ IMO innovation is not the problem, adaptation is. No business can survive if they don't adapt to fickle consumers where a significant portion of them will always use the resources available to them while simultaneously seeking to save money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_City#2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_City#2000s
- 6y ago

by gedy 6y ago

trentnix 6y ago

Oh yeah, bike retailers have seen their fair share of exhortations to "innovate". And that's why some of them tried opening coffee shops or brewing beer or hiring consultants to help them create better merchandising to "reach female buyers that like to shop" and ways to spend your money with no return. Why manage one struggling business (your bike shop) when you can manage two struggling businesses (your bike shop and your coffee shop)! Really, retail has largely been gamed past the point of no return. "Win the Holidays", as Best Buy put it a few years ago. Consumers evangelize their hookup, not their service experience. Maybe bike consumers don't need the support and service the bike business traditionally offered. Camera stores are gone, but camera sales have never been better. Cameras are better and more accessible than ever before, too. Maybe the bike business will follow the same path. Time will tell. EDIT: Funny enough, cameras are still subject to MAP and it is generally enforced fiercely.

hug 6y ago
All camera sales are in steep decline year on year, assuming you’re ignoring smartphones. The compact camera market is essentially dead, no one is making DSLRs in the future, and the mirrorless market is shrinking.
- trentnix 6y ago
  My anecdote must be then, at best, a few years old. But I am continually amazed at the quality of the cameras available both in my phone and in standalone cameras. Innovation continues even though the market has radically changed.
- dbspin 6y ago
  This is absolutely untrue for video cameras - both DSLM's and larger 'cinema cameras' like the FX9 and C300 iii, let alone Arri and Red models. They're selling faster that they can be manufactured in many cases.
  - hug 6y ago
    It is 100% true for all CIPA members. Mirrorless sales are down. Unit price is up, but the market is contracting: https://www.dpreview.com/news/7282900211/cipa-s-latest-numbers-show-camera-production-sales-slashed-by-half-in-march https://www.dpreview.com/news/7282900211/cipa-s-latest-numbe... What I just said may not be true for Red or Arri, but you don’t walk into Joe’s Camera to buy an Arri, and for their high-end models they’re literally only available to rent for production anyway. Long lead times on new cameras is not indicative of high sales in a vacuum, just high sales relative to projected demand, which again is absurdly low.
    - dbspin 6y ago
      You're conflating video camera and digital camera sales. It'd be great to see sales numbers for all the major manufacturers, but Canon have in the last year launched five new cinema focused cameras (R5, R6, C70, C300 iii and C500 ii), Sony have launched three (A7sii, FX9, FX6). All of these (the ones that are currently available at least) appear - both from availability, and the frequency I see them on location - to be selling extremely well. As to your 'high end models' comment. That isn't remotely true. Arri make one camera, the Alexa 65, that isn't available for retail. Red make one line of cameras, the Red Ranger, that wasn't available but now is. They also make custom cameras for specific DOPs occasionally. But broadly speaking both manufacturers only make 'high end models' (only exception being the new Red Komodo pro-sumer crash cam), and they're all for sale (and doing extremely well).
unethical_ban 6y ago
I've never met an LBS that could service a bicycle on the time estimate they quote. And most people don't realize that quality bikes are worth their price, vs. the Huffy at Walmart, but that's all they can afford. So yeah, why manage one business destined to fail on its own when you can try to be a social hub? Look at Capital One with their "bank coffee shops". Look at how breweries have differentiated themselves. Bike shops are niche, like book shops are now, and will have to really offer a top-notch service and pricing experience to compete.
krooj 6y ago
The bike business is funny, right? It's one of those businesses where you really need to find your niche in order to succeed. If you think you're gonna survive off a franchise store or something in a strip mall, you will die. Some models that I've seen weather online retail are either going after a captive audience, such as commuters in a city, MTB shops here in Santa Cruz or they cater to super, super high end customers that are paying for an experience (La Biciletta/Blacksmith in Toronto). Lotta shops make up for retail on service as well, but yet again, that requires the captive audience. In regards to dirt cheap OEM parts from Europe, that's largely stopped. Most of those online retailers won't ship Shimano groupsets to NA anymore and while you can find good deals online, I tend to see them being sold from US-based companies. In any case, with the way manufacturers have shifted away from standards, being your own home mechanic has gotten prohibitively expensive, with the need for various presses and extraction tools, etc... I tend to see many more high-end factory bikes on the road than bespokes and forget doing your own suspension work on modern MTBs...
- trentnix 6y ago
  In regards to dirt cheap OEM parts from Europe, that's largely stopped. That is excellent news for bike shops. I just hope it's not too little, too late. It kinda defeats the narrative from Shimano and others it was legally impossible to do so, though.
- lhoff 6y ago
  The ironic thing about the dirt cheap OEM parts from europe ruining local business is, its happening in europe as well. If a local shop orders parts from lets say shimano it must be bought from the official shimano importer. All while the online shops import it themselves and undercut the prices by a lot. I once wanted to buy a new bearing for the crankset and my bike was already disassembled. So i went to the local shop to avoid waiting for shipment (was before next/same day delivery was a thing in germany). The price there was about 50 or 60€ while the online price was something in the 20th. I talked to the owner what the reason for that big of a difference and he showed me his official B2B catalogue. It was basically the price he asked for. So he wouldn't even make money out of it if I would have bought it there. He recommended to just buy it online which I then did.
hakfoo 6y ago
A secondary problem is that even if you offer the best, most trustworthy customer experience possible, people will naturally discount it because they will have the feeling you're just trying to steer them to more expensive/higher margin/higher kickback purchases. Shops sometimes say "Non-commissioned salesperson" to try to diffuse that belief, but I'm skeptical. I wonder if for major purchases, there'd be a market equivalent to the "independent fee-based investment advisor." Basically unbundle the service experience brick-and-mortar traditionally provided and let people buy it seperately. You'd pay a modest service charge up front and discuss with them what your needs are, and then they find you the right product and the cheapest/most reliable place to buy it. It comes with a service guarantee-- if you buy through their recommendation, they are responsible for negotiating warranty/service hassles. I could see spending a $20 fee to know I completely slam-dunked a $500 purchase, especially if they can regularly yield outcomes like "Our huge network of merchant data found you the bike/appliance/etc. you wanted at some tiny brick-and-mortar in Baltimore and it comes out $50 cheaper delivered than any retailer you'd consider locally." Brick-and-mortar retailers don't have to try to maintain an expensive sales and customer-service experience and convert to rack-em-high-sell-em-cheap warehouses, and no-service-required customers can skip the consultancy and go directly to them and still get a decent price. They "advisor" service would have to be explicitly independent and no-kickbacks for this to work... so I suspect what would happen is that it would build trust for a few years, then start undermining it by taking incentives to steer business.
- achow 6y ago
  > Our huge network of merchant data found.. at some tiny brick-and-mortar in Baltimore and it comes out $50 cheaper Here is the crux: the 'supply chain' for gathering the data from all the tiny stores in small towns, who may not even have a retail system or may not be even connected, would be intractable.
  - splatzone 6y ago
    Use a call centre to contact 100 stores at once?
- spicybright 6y ago
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
The bicycle industry has a problem in that prices on consummable parts have far outstripped the rate of inflation. There is no reason for decent chains, tires, and cassettes to cost $60+ when they were $30 20 years ago. Motorcycle parts are comparatively cheaper for just as much engineering rigor, far more material input, and lower available consumer base for North Am. It's all about the price gouging for the OEMs.

throwaway201103 6y ago

This is nothing new. In the 1980s I was into photography. The local camera shop sales guys were always complaining about the people who would come in, spend hours talking about and looking at gear, and then they would leave and order it from 47th Street Photo, or Adorama, or one of the other NYC mail order sellers.

ghaff 6y ago
True. Although in retrospect, I see a lot of those local stores as having a limited inventory of gear and all the incentive in the world to push that inventory. While I have a special place in my heart for things like indie bookstores, homebrew suppliers, etc. a lot of small local specialty shops really weren't all that great.
jerrac 6y ago
I'd like to see some of the stores become actual showrooms. You go in, get to handle the actual product. Then, if you decide to buy, do it there via the stores affiliate link. If not, you pay the store $N on your way out. That way the customer gets the price they want, and the store makes some money for letting them handle things.
- enriquto 6y ago
  Also, I'd happily pay the store to deal with any warranty issues. I just talk to the person of the store (whom I paid for that service), and they communicate with whoever they need to get the issue solved. In the meantime, they give me a replacement item. This service should be offered, at a higher price tag, even if I bought my product elsewhere, no questions asked.
  - zdw 6y ago
    This sounds a lot like the Apple physical stores - they'll sell and service any gear made by Apple. Also helps that Apple is vertically integrated and has tight control over it's supply chain and applies MAP very uniformly.
- 6y ago

bsg75 6y ago

My observation in the years leading up to the online giants dominating some markets (electronics for example), was that retail stores that could adequately guide customers was rapidly declining. Medical supply is probably a different category, where expertise is more important than others. But in more common examples, when I would go to a store and already knew more about their product lines than the salespeople, the local price difference was a turnoff. I'm happy to pay a reasonable uplift if a vendor can educate, guide or support me as a customer. But when few of them can, I literally have no reason to patronize them. As fast shipping became an option, there was less and less reason to go to a showroom other than to independently look at a product person. In 2020, I don't even care about that, because return policies are liberal. My favorite case example is CircuitCity [1]: "In 2003, Circuit City converted to a single hourly pay structure in all stores, eliminating commissioned sales. Many previously commissioned sales associates were offered new positions as hourly "product specialists", while 3,900 salespeople were laid off, saving the company about $130 million per year. Many company insiders later revealed that they thought this was the most influential company decision that would ultimately lead to its demise." Lowering costs by eliminating qualified and experiences salespeople, attempting to become an expertise-less local storefront competing on price with businesses that have lower costs was a suicide move, and endemic of executives attempting to run companies based _purely_ on a bottom line, without actually understanding the market they are in. "Excel Excutives" in my words. On the other hand, I have begun doing more business with BestBuy this year. Not because they have changed their level of in store expertise, but because when I need something, they can compete with Amazon in some cases on a combination of price and convenience. I can find if their store has something, the quantity, and have it in hand with no more than drive time. In the work-from-mode many of us are in, this can be a big deal. Plus, I can get appliances from them with installation, and office furniture from their delivery services that is a bit of a gamble from Amazon, who so far is not as convenient for "big box" shipping. I hope BB continues what they are doing, because they seem to have figured out some of the variables to _adapt._ IMO innovation is not the problem, adaptation is. No business can survive if they don't adapt to fickle consumers where a significant portion of them will always use the resources available to them while simultaneously seeking to save money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_City#2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_City#2000s

6y ago