Well, of course.  They lay out all the stuff for you to take your pick;
they're there just to take your money.  They don't have to know what an
xyz plug is, you're supposed to find it yourself. {:-)

The retailer or assistant who knows what they are selling is a rare
bird.  They are trained in the use of bar code scanners, nothing else.

Colin D.

(Preface all of the following with "IMHO" and "YMMV".)

I'm not sure that retailers ever played a massive part in MARKETING
the computer industry; the exception may be the ones who built and
sold their own machines. Quite a few of the latter type were
represented at Cebit-style shows in Australia, and there WAS the
occasional appearance of the Hardly Normal type outfit at those shows,
but for the most part those shows were populated by the manufacturers
or distributors; your (then) Compaqs, HP's, Microsofts, Lotuses
(remember them?) and so on. Remember the old PCxx shows (held in
Sydney at the Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour for the most part,
with similar shows in some other capital cities) each year? They (or
their successors) have been hanging by a thread for years now and
weren't even on in some years. The same forces at work against Cebit
were (and still are) at work against them as well.

If you think back to the late '80's/early 90's, most of the people who
were buying computers (or responsible for buying them, in the case of
businesses) had a certain level of enthusiasm for them. Also, the
computers' performance was such that questions like whether they had a
386 SX vs a 386 DX, or had ISA vs EISA cards were ones which actually
mattered. These days MOST new computers will do MOST things that
people need reasonably well. The main exception may be hard core
gamers. (Although I'll admit that the ATI Raedon card that I foolishly
bought when I last upgraded my desktop is a piece of crap which runs
even a fairly "mainstream" program like Medieval 2 Total War (and
pretty much ANY motion graphics intensive program) slower than a
glacier moves down a mountain - and much slower than the much earlier
NVidia card in the system that it replaced. But I digress. And to run
a query on a largish table in Access, you need something more like a
frickin' Cray Supercomputer than a Pentium IV, but I digress further.)
Perhaps the likes of thee and me who need good graphics fidelity are
another niche crowd, but again still a minority. Consequently there's
no real need for people (whether they're end users or purchasing
decision-makers for a business) to go along to an annual computer show
to compare this model against that model and see what new features are
on offer. "If I go with the Samsung 4* CD-ROM vs the Phillips 2*
CD-ROM will I have compatibility issues"-type questions are now
redundant; most purchasers don't give a damn what type of drive (or
processor, or memory) is in there, they just expect to slip in a disk
(or fire up a program) and see it work. Basically computers have
become commodities... and the profit margins (never as great as people
thought they were from the prices) have also shrunk accordingly.

Accordingly there's little need for retailers (and their sales
'droids) to have any more than a rudimentary knowledge of what's under
the hood, nor for retailers to spend money attracting people who have
such knowledge. Sell 'em and ship 'em is the motto.

The other factor marking this change is the Web, which you didn't have
(as a mainstream resource) even (say) 15 years ago when those shows
were in their heyday. When I had to replace my notebook earlier this
year I'd completely lost track of the state of the processor,
motherboard and graphics card market. A quick Google of some of the
Comp.Sys groups and a check of a couple of web sites like Tom's
Hardware, and I was back up to speed in a couple of hours. For most
sellers, whether retailers or not, building a web site which gets good
hits (and ideally high "Google visibility"), and which "sells" their
products effectively is a much more efficient use of resources than
paying the cost of, and spending time at, an annual show. (Much less
the cost of hiring bimbos in bikinis to stand draped over their stand
as if they knew the difference between a memory module and a CD-ROM.)
It reaches more people, whether they be retail customers or corporate
ones. (Yes, yes, I know, so few web sites fall into this category, but
EVENTUALLY some of them should figure out that site visitors are there
for information, not eye candy. Not that the two are always mutually
exclusive; I still recall the old Canon site for the EOS300D which
managed to combine the two extremely well.)

Exactly, the same forces are at play. Computers are now just "boxes to
be shipped". Cameras are probably at the same "tipping point" now as
computers were around, say, 1999/2000. Once upon a time most people
HAD cameras, but in the majority of cases, probably Instamatic types
rather than SLRs. They'd snap a roll of film maybe once every 6 months
on a holiday or at a family gathering, then eventually get it
developed at a "one hour" place or, in the REALLY old days, mail it
off to Kodak in Melbourne. Then they'd get it back, and wonder what
the hell they were aiming at in THAT picture. 8^> Only the true
aficionados would go out and buy expensive SLRs and glass and learn
the arcane arts of chemical processing. However the margins that they
paid on that gear; the cameras, the lenses, the chemicals, paper and
so on were probably enough to keep a reasonable number of specialist
shops alive, especially as the DIY developing crowd had to keep coming
back for consumables. With the increase in (relatively) cheap
digitals, though, and the increase in the resolution and fidelity of
the images produced, the retailers are getting squeezed from below in
the P&S market, and above in the prosumer digital market. You don't
need to spend any money on chemicals or paper to download from your CF
card into Photoshop Elements or, at the upper end, CS2.

There's probably a degree of "swings and roundabouts" here; the money
that enthusiast photographers aren't spending on consumables after a
switch to digital may still be being spent on accessories and lenses,
or, more likely, new bodies more frequently. If you bought a Canon T70
back in 1986 you probably expected it to last for 20 or 30 years. Buy
an EOS400D today and you'l probably be thinking about a replacement in
5 or 6 years. HOWEVER, that trend will probably plateau as well as
cameras, like computers before them, start to reach a point where the
benefits of upgrading are only incremental. Go from a 486SX 25MHz
processor to a 486DX/2  66 MHz processor in the days of yore, and the
performance upgrade was astounding in almost every piece of software
in use. Go from a P4M (2002) to a Centrino Duo (earlier this year) in
your notebook and the difference is... barely noticable, except for
the reduction in weight (part of which is the absence of a 3.5" FDD)
and increase in battery life. Going from, say, an EOS300D to an
EOS400D would more likely to be the latter experience than the former,
unless you're printing very large prints and the extra 4MP makes a
difference. Therefore as we move forward in time there's going to be
less reason to upgrade, and less business for the specialist camera
stores.

Conversely the fact that digital allows people much easier access to
photography (not having to wait until you finish a roll of film is a
big bonus) MAY encourage more amateurs to take their photographic
skills further, and therefore buy more equipment. And they MAY, if
they want to get serious about it, seek out specialist resellers as
experience will have told them that unless they're very, very lucky,
all they'll get at Hardly Normal or David Jones is a slack jaw and a
blank stare in response to their questions.

As to which of these factors ultimately holds the most weight... who
the hell knows? Let's revisit this thread in 5 years and see who
guessed right. 8^>

I think that the places which are marginal - perhaps because of
location, perhaps because they've hired salespeople or minimum-wagers
rather than true enthusiasts, perhaps for other reasons - are an
endangered species. There was a Fletchers in Burwood Westfield
(Sydney), for example, which had so few people through it that I'm
amazed it survived for as long as it did. It's now a "street clothing"
store.

My bet is that the vast majority of photographic sales will go through
Hardly Normal type places, but then specialist camera stores may not
have sold Joe and Joanne Average their Instamatics back in the old
days either. (Chemists used to sell quite a few low end cameras since
they were often the conduit through which you'd submit your photos for
processing, strange as it may now seem.) However while I think we'll
see some consolidation (buzz-speak for "going bust") in specialist
resellers, I also think that the better specialist stores (your Foto
Riesel Kent Street type places, for example) will still garner enough
business to stay afloat by word of mouth. And while I can see Hardly
Normal et al shipping most of the bodies, even in the prosumer market,
I can't see them stocking the kinds of photo esoterica (reflectors,
some of the more obscure lenses, etc, etc) that you'll find at a good
specialist store. I guess a lot of this will also come down to whether
we, as photographers (and granted, I use the term loosely in my own
case) are prepared to support them, or whether we just go for the
cheapest price.

Well, this is another case of "it's not what it once was". I remember
when Dick Smith WAS run by Dick Smith, the emphasis would be on the
enthusiasm for the product. Smith would famously get into video
hookups with his store managers around the country and discuss new
products and releases. Now that it's just part of Woolies, it's all
just about the bottom line. Hire people who'll work at the cheapest
rate and can read a catalogue... and hopefully they'll have some
selling skills too, but that's optional. Knowledge of WHAT they're
selling is way down the back of the field somewhere. It's like the
MBA-inspired horse-hockey that "management" is just a skill, and can
be translated to any field even if you don't know didly-squat ABOUT
that field. Salesmanship is treated the same way. "You're prepared to
work at $8.50 an hour with no penalty rates but don't know a capacitor
from a diode? Hey, as long as you can slur "Good Morning" to a
customer without drooling too much, you're hired! Sign here..."

Reminds me of when I asked about monitor calibration tools in Ted's and
Camera House, all I got was very dumb looks.

I'd love to ask this question (quoting you of course) elsewhere on the web..
may I?