Future Trend in Retail Stores?

[HDNitehawk]

At present you can buy the low end consumer lenses and bodies at Best Buy in our town. The two largest cities in my state have one significant camera store in each town. They will have the more common L items only. Occasionally they have a D series body and they push Nikon and third party lenses harder than Canon, because of the profit margins. If you go in to either and just ask for a DSLR, you are going to be handed a Nikon product. Your recent purchase of a new tripod, you wouldn't have found anything even close to that quality at these stores.

The local stores here are always packed, they have less than 1000sf of floor space and I think they make a god living.

I do not live in a small town, the two major cities here rank 30th and 45th in population. Not huge but you would think that we would at least get one Canon store.

Most people are looking for the cheapest deal they can and you just aren't going to get that at the local store. The other thing is the return policies, the local stores would have had a fit if I had returned the 24-70mm twice to try a different copy. B&H returns are no problem at all, other than the hassle of shipping it back and forth.

Convenience and fear will keep the local stores in business. People fear buying off the internet because of bad stores. The more people learn which are the reputable internet firms to buy from the more the little stores will be hurt. But convenience will keep them in business I think, but I compare shopping there to doing my grocery shopping at the 7/11.

If we are deep in to this hobby, the internet for many of us will be our main source of goods.