makepeace wrote
Alan Ratcliffe wrote
If we don't support local, they will never get to the point where they can buy enough stock to compete with overseas stores.
Excuse my ignorance, and I don't mean to be inflammatory, but here's a thought. If local stores have never actually reached this "point", where our shop's halls are decked with guitars, amps and other product of every need imagined (like some stores in other countries), whats to say they will in the future, online stores or not?
Onlines stores have a distinct advantage - they don't have to carry inventory. They can buy from their suppliers on a JIT (Just In Time) basis and they can do that with money you've already given them for stuff they probably don't actually have at the time you place the order.
Contrast that with a real world store. Take a trip to Music Connection. Look at the shop, look at what's on the floor (floors in this case). Start to imagine what all of that costs. And that's all money that could be in the bank earning interest for them. So
a) they have to adjust their profit margins to counteract the potential earnings they lose by having their money sitting on a shelf for months (maybe years) except for quick turn over items like strings and picks.
b) what they can have on the floor is limited by the size of their bank balance and by what they think they can sell into a market they have some idea about.
The market here is smaller. Full stop. Thus the shops here don't have the cash and the volume of business to be able to stock what some big overseas stores stock. Also the smaller market gets saturated more quickly - it gets harder for a brand to break into the market here.
I'd also add that our opinions of overseas stores are maybe a little unrealistic. We see some impressive stores on the 'net, but not every store overseas is like that. In the last few years I've been knocking around or looking for music stores in Brighton, Bath, London, Norwich and Manchester. They're not all behemoths that would swallow Music Connection up without even noticing, and they don't all stock every conceivable piece of kit.
Forget boutique pedals, I went shopping for a Univibe in Denmark Street. Nobody had even a 2nd hand one. I also couldn't get any of the vibe clones such as the Dejavibe. There was one store, recommended to me by several others as FX pedal specialists, who tried to sell me a Phase 90 as it was "nearly the same". Hmmm.....
Humidifiers... forget it in most cases. The store in Norwich was out of stock. The shop in Manchester had them (which surprised me as it's a pretty damp city) but that was because they stocked orchestral instruments as well, so they stocked the sort of humidifier that you could dangle through an f-hole in a cello or violin. They also had ordered me a set of Schaller machine heads that, they said, were a drop-in replacement for the Gotohs on my Morgan. They got the price wrong (by 20 pounds) and the parts didn't fit. That said, when I queried the price they did drop down to the price that they'd quoted me.
I tried to buy a certain kind of Fender pick that I liked. Nobody had them, one shop had a no-name pick that was similar. I did go to one store in Denmark Street (Hanks?) that had a good range of high-end acoustics, but at a price and not set up. What are significantly cheaper over there were the British brands such as Fylde, Atkins and Lowden, but for whatever reason you can hardly find them in London.
It's not necessarily the land of milk and honey over there. Guitars don't grow on trees and the streets ain't paved with FX pedals.
