Happy Trails Henry's

cgw · May 5, 2020

Canada's largest photo retailer circles the drain:

Henry's, Canada's Top Photo Retailer, to Close a Quarter of Its Stores

Happy talk aside from the CEO, this chain was plainly in trouble months before the pandemic shutdown. Over-expansion(4 stores alone in my former western Toronto GTA area!), iffy CRM, price-trailing, numb staff, puzzling expansion into photo printing, lame online content creation--all played a role in piling up a C$24 million shortfall. Most Canadian photographers can share a Henry's horror story. Doubt they will be part of any new normal.

JBPhotog · May 5, 2020

Thanks, you saved me a trip into town to poke around.

cgw · May 5, 2020

Hard not to relish the irony of Henry's shrinking presence at Queen+Church allowing recent expansion of nearby Downtown Camera--a store thriving on film photography that took the space for expanded b&w and C-41 processing capacity.

Derrel · May 5, 2020

Closing 7 of 29 locations...sounds like a plan in this covid-19 economy.

tirediron · May 5, 2020

They took over a local store here in Victoria, 2-3 years ago. Horrible. Nothing but cheap 'Promaster' junk, staff who knew NOTHING....

Derrel · May 5, 2020

Promaster...the name says it all...

cgw · May 5, 2020

tirediron said:
They took over a local store here in Victoria, 2-3 years ago. Horrible. Nothing but cheap 'Promaster' junk, staff who knew NOTHING....

Hated the sub-par high-markup store brand schlock(Cameron comes to mind)that crowded the good stuff off the shelves. Was shopping around at Xmas looking at a seasonally-discounted Fuji X-E3 body when I was offered a used version going for more than new. Suspect all their major suppliers are getting torrents of return merch Henry's can't pay for. They're bravely keeping up their online store but there's not much chance they'll survive. BestBuy stole their low-end business, Vistek took the hi-end/pro customers and Amazon took the rest.

tirediron · May 5, 2020

Vistek gets all my mail-order business for real gear.

Raw photographer · May 8, 2020

If they close permanently, i'll probable loose my warranty i have on a camera with them.

JBPhotog · May 8, 2020

You may get service from one of their other locations that isn’t closing.

FWIW, back when I still had hair I worked in retail camera sales. Extended warranties from retail resellers is not worth the paper it is written on for 95% of the claims made. Save your money and open up a bank account for repairs and put the “warranty” money in there.

VidThreeNorth · Jun 1, 2020

Every time I thought about posting something here I got depressed and wandered off somewhere else. I have had friends working at Henry's back when I was into film SLRs. Even within the last 10 years I knew one "old timer" who got back in the business who was at one of their stores for a while. It is hard for me to find anything good that happened since Cranbrook took over. It would be interesting to find out who those people are. Do any of them have any background in photography? I think I might make a few short posts with specific criticisms and maybe even a compliment where appropriate. If nothing else, other stores might learn a bit from what I have to say:

About Their Website Interface:

Go back about five years and Henry's web interface was like B&H's. It had "x" items on a page and then you could go to the next page. You could open a page for an item in a new tab and go back and forth between tabs. Then you could open another item in another tab and go back and forth to compare the items. It worked well for comparison shopping. I often shop this way. Also, if you knew the website well enough (not hard), you could skip pages. If you open the "Mirrorless Lens" page in price order "low to high" you can skip pages of lens adapters. And long lists don't bog down. Now with the new web pages, a search results in an "infinite length" page that gets added to at the bottom. This is painful at best because if you search for lenses, well, they better have a lot of lenses because if they didn't, then why would I bother looking at their site at all? So you end up scrolling and scrolling and the page gets slower and slower and then you find something that looks interesting and click on it (it will NOT OPEN INTO A NEW TAB) and read what it has to say. Then your only option is to click the back button to continue and guess what? The page takes a really long time to reformat again, probably losing the pictures for the items and possibly crashing, forcing you to start over again. This is not good. What is baffling is that they don't seem to realize how bad this is. Don't any of the Cranbrook people actually buy anything online? Haven't they seen it? It is so obviously a disaster that only a complete idiot could miss the problems. And they could have rolled it back to the old style website long ago. B&H still uses their old website, and that is where I do more "browsing".

On the topic of Websites, around the time of the Covid-19 lock down they dropped the "Used" pages from the Website. I don't know if that was because of the Covid-19 lock down, but as of last week, the stores were supposedly open again and I don't see the "Used" pages on the website back yet.

cgw · Jun 2, 2020

I bought craploads of used gear off Henry's eBay site 10+ years ago. Never an issue, condition was never less than EXC+ or Mint- despite lower ratings. Same with in-store shopping: smart staff, fair prices, fast special orders. But when long-time employees bailed and showed up smiling at Vistek, it was obvious things had changed. No more discounts for steady customers, generally higher prices, and more schlocky store-brand merch than ever. Seems they've become iffy about trade-ins, which partially explains the poor used selection. But I can't help think local Kijiji/Craigslist sales actually killed their used business. Now all that's left is sketchy/overpriced "used" stuff at their Mississauga clearance outlet, along with a scattering of genuine bargains on open box gear.

Sadly, the huge downdraft on retail sales will likely take them under.

VidThreeNorth · Jul 3, 2020

Henry's used equipment showed up online around June 29, 2020 (it might have been a bit earlier, but I didn't see it till around the 29th). The website programming has not changed though.

Mike Drone · Jul 3, 2020

Any photography industry not making it is sad news. I can not image how hard it is for business owners in this day and age. What we can do is move forward with what we have and be awesome!