On Sunday, September 28, 2003, at 05:06 PM, william.curwen wrote:
OMy independent photo dealer tells me that his most profitable items are
belive it or not - batteries. GBP�1000 of wholesale batteries yields
GDP�3000 profit per month. He feels that sales of digi-cams is a loss leader
in that he has to sell GBP�6000 of digicams per month to make �500 profit.
William
That is quite correct - and your dealer is doing well to even make THAT margin on a digi-cam.
When I was in that part of the industry we always used to recognise that a half decent salesman could make considerably more margin (in terms of actual cash) selling a couple of filters and a bag as extras to a camera purchase, than he would on the camera alone - and that was 20 years ago! It's teh same reason tehy always try to sell you shoe polish when you buy a pair of shoes.
The other thing that is a problem for dealers, particularly at the high end of the digital market, is that they - like all the rest of us - are constantly having to update their demo equipment (not just cameras etc but the computers and peripherals to support them) In the good old days the equipment stayed current long enough that with sensible rotation of demo stock you could at worst sell it for cost price, but everything is changing so fast nowadays that a dealer has to be extremely astute and on the ball to even recoup his cost price on sales stock when a new model appears, let alone demo stock. It must be a nightmare for a manufacturer like Kodak to accurately forecast future demand to set production levels, it being just as easy to underestimate (especially if you got it wrong last time and were left with a load of stock to offload at a loss) which is one reason why so often in the past there has been a dearth of a latest product.
It's just another facet of the same problem we all have in this digital era as we sit in front of our computer, scanner, digital camera whatever and realise that it is depreciating at probably well in excess of 50% pa. Sure it still works, but when whatever computer/OS no longer supports whatever peripheral/application etc.....
I'm sure many of us either have a legacy system running to support some perfectly usable kit, either that or a large pile of computer doorstops in the corner - written off within a very few years of original purchase.
Trouble is we all want the newer/faster version of everything. Until very recently I have always almost automatically upgraded to the newest version of pretty well all my apps. There are now a couple of key apps that I use every day quite happily, where I am sitting thinking - do I really need to upgrade? What I've got already works fine for me. But then I wouldn't know what a lot of the interesting discussions on this (and other lists) were all about. Wouldn't life then be boring <g>
----------------------- Best, Francis Newman Webshot Ltd, UK
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