Walter Hamler wrote: > Mark, you and others make some good points. However, I have talked to > our local "full service" camera/hobby store and they told some pretty > dreary stories about how the Pentax rep would rarely visit their store > or do much of any communicating. Eventually the store owners just > dropped Pentax from the line. They lament that they would love to > carry Pentax but it's hard to do meaningful business with a voice on > the other end of a phone or via cryptic emails. > One of the owners gave me the name and phone number of a camera store > in another "southern" city that sold tons of Pentax gear because they > had a responsive sales rep. I was very surprised to learn it was the > very same store in the city I grew up in and where I bought all my > photo gear as a young teen just getting into the hobby. That was over > 50 years ago. For any store to not only survive but even flourish in > this day and era says a lot about how they do business.
That's true, but it would seem to me that the new Pentax plan is designed to address just that problem. In the past, many reps would devote most of their attention to places that moved the biggest numbers, at the expense of the enthusiast shops. In the age of the Big Box store, that tendency is even stronger. Pentax's division of their staff into teams specific to specialty shops, mass merchandisers and online retailers seems like a deliberate move to counter this tendency. I think it's a very smart thing for them to do. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
