The demise of photo stores

[KevinR]

I was doing some printing this weekend and ran out of paper. Why I ran out of paper is another story. I was really having an off day on nailing my exposures down. Anyway, there is only a couple stores around the Detroit area that have paper. One only carrys Kodak and Ilford, and most of that is heading for the out-of-date bin. The other is in Ann Arbor, and has a good selection of papers. Drove out there to find out the day before was there last day open. I talked to the guy for a little bit. It was pretty sad, he said he hung in as long as he could. I really would have liked to support the local guys, but it looks like I'm ordering from B&H or Freestyle from now on. Actually, Freestyle was a little cheaper than B&H, so I put a decent size order in with them.

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[terri]

The 2 camera stores I frequent usually only have Kodak and Ilford. Someone told me Agfa won't ship to retailers like them anymore. ??? I'd not heard that one.

I can still find pretty much everything I need for the darkroom and other miscellaneous stuff, as long as it isn't too specialized. But the stores have both made it obvious that digicams and inkjet supplies are the leaders. I think it's got as much to do with these giant online stores putting the squeeze on these little guys, as anything else. It sure forces us to check inventory a lot more, no doubt!

[Chase]

Unfortunately, I just found out that one of my local stores has just closed. There are 2 or 3 that are very local to me and this one happened to be my preference. Its sad to lose the local resources and personal service, but the world seems to be heading in that direction.

[Scurra]

It seems the web is killing some of the small photo shops. Thankfully when I'm in Kent there is a shop that is doing quite well about 5 minutes drive from where I live, the people there are mostly about my age and really into their photography as well, they offer everything I could possibly need from a wide range of dark room supplies to second hand cameras and lenses, kit bags and tripods. But the only competition they have is Jessops so I guess they win hands down!

[Unimaxium]

A local camera shop around here recently closed, too. They were the only real pro supply shop that I know of in town. They had such a great selection of film and paper, it really sucks now that they're gone. And I thought they were doing good business; they had such a nice store and a very thorough supply that it looked like they were doing fine. But then I went on vacation for a week and when I came back they were closed for good!

I think someone should start a chain of good professional camera stores and drive all those multiplying, crappy, over-charging Ritz Cameras & the like away.

[matchframe]

An interesting thing has happened in the Houston area, there are a few stores that are holding on to film based photography, and they have formed a sort of alliance with each other. As other stores went out of business the surviving stores went together and bought out all the stock, and divided the business among each other.

One store deals mostly in cameras..... new and used, while the other store deals mostly in darkroom chemicals and supplies. Each store does have on hand a little of everything, but one specializes in either cameras or darkroom.

When the darkroom supply store moved several months ago, my fear was it was going out of business, but it just needed more floor space to handle all of the stock they keep on hand.

[akyiia]

I must say I do support local shops but unfortunatelly there are not many around Soton anymore. There is one where I loved to buy papers and chemicals and I didn't even mind the fact that they were more expensive than web shops; however, this shop started to chage into half digital - half analogue (nothing against it) and due to this they hired many new (young) people. Sadly for the shop, these new employees are taking the shop down as they do not really care about it. Many times it happened to me that the staff had no idea what was the difference between daylight and tungsten film. The last time I went to this shop was when I asked them to develop my 120 colouf film and leave it uncut. They cut it and left 'wonderful' traces of fingerprints all over my negs. So much for last B/W darkroom supply in Southampton.

[c.cloudwalker]

I would expect that 6 years after this thread was started the photo store situation is worse

[ann]

you beat me too it cc

[johnh2005]

I live in a town of 300,000+ plus people. Our only photography stores are Wal-Mart and Best Buy! Go go Corpus Christi.

[Bynx]

Toronto has a few million people in it and not a camera store to be found. Oh there is a Henry's, Black's, Downtown Camera, Adens. But they only sell cameras, tripods and the usual small sampling of redundant bits and pieces. If you want something like a pano head, or an attachment to take 360° images in one shot or devices to fire a flash by remote the only camera store to be found is on the internet. Black's used to be a camera store, but now they just make prints and sell frames.

[johnh2005]

Toronto has a few million people in it and not a camera store to be found. Oh there is a Henry's, Black's, Downtown Camera, Adens. But they only sell cameras, tripods and the usual small sampling of redundant bits and pieces. If you want something like a pano head, or an attachment to take 360° images in one shot or devices to fire a flash by remote the only camera store to be found is on the internet. Black's used to be a camera store, but now they just make prints and sell frames.

Well at least you have a Camera Store. We don't. Not a single one. I mean unless you count Best Buy and Wal-Mart where you are lucky if they have a working DSLR on display. Forget about asking to have them unbox one for you to play with. At least we have some awesome Sunpack tripods to choose from! lolololol