Really, retail has largely been gamed past the point of no return. "Win the Holidays", as Best Buy put it a few years ago. Consumers evangelize their hookup, not their service experience.
Maybe bike consumers don't need the support and service the bike business traditionally offered. Camera stores are gone, but camera sales have never been better. Cameras are better and more accessible than ever before, too. Maybe the bike business will follow the same path. Time will tell.
EDIT: Funny enough, cameras are still subject to MAP and it is generally enforced fiercely.
What I just said may not be true for Red or Arri, but you don’t walk into Joe’s Camera to buy an Arri, and for their high-end models they’re literally only available to rent for production anyway.
Long lead times on new cameras is not indicative of high sales in a vacuum, just high sales relative to projected demand, which again is absurdly low.
It'd be great to see sales numbers for all the major manufacturers, but Canon have in the last year launched five new cinema focused cameras (R5, R6, C70, C300 iii and C500 ii), Sony have launched three (A7sii, FX9, FX6). All of these (the ones that are currently available at least) appear - both from availability, and the frequency I see them on location - to be selling extremely well.
As to your 'high end models' comment. That isn't remotely true. Arri make one camera, the Alexa 65, that isn't available for retail. Red make one line of cameras, the Red Ranger, that wasn't available but now is. They also make custom cameras for specific DOPs occasionally. But broadly speaking both manufacturers only make 'high end models' (only exception being the new Red Komodo pro-sumer crash cam), and they're all for sale (and doing extremely well).
So yeah, why manage one business destined to fail on its own when you can try to be a social hub? Look at Capital One with their "bank coffee shops". Look at how breweries have differentiated themselves. Bike shops are niche, like book shops are now, and will have to really offer a top-notch service and pricing experience to compete.
In regards to dirt cheap OEM parts from Europe, that's largely stopped. Most of those online retailers won't ship Shimano groupsets to NA anymore and while you can find good deals online, I tend to see them being sold from US-based companies. In any case, with the way manufacturers have shifted away from standards, being your own home mechanic has gotten prohibitively expensive, with the need for various presses and extraction tools, etc... I tend to see many more high-end factory bikes on the road than bespokes and forget doing your own suspension work on modern MTBs...
That is excellent news for bike shops. I just hope it's not too little, too late. It kinda defeats the narrative from Shimano and others it was legally impossible to do so, though.
If a local shop orders parts from lets say shimano it must be bought from the official shimano importer. All while the online shops import it themselves and undercut the prices by a lot.
I once wanted to buy a new bearing for the crankset and my bike was already disassembled. So i went to the local shop to avoid waiting for shipment (was before next/same day delivery was a thing in germany). The price there was about 50 or 60€ while the online price was something in the 20th. I talked to the owner what the reason for that big of a difference and he showed me his official B2B catalogue. It was basically the price he asked for. So he wouldn't even make money out of it if I would have bought it there. He recommended to just buy it online which I then did.
I wonder if for major purchases, there'd be a market equivalent to the "independent fee-based investment advisor." Basically unbundle the service experience brick-and-mortar traditionally provided and let people buy it seperately. You'd pay a modest service charge up front and discuss with them what your needs are, and then they find you the right product and the cheapest/most reliable place to buy it. It comes with a service guarantee-- if you buy through their recommendation, they are responsible for negotiating warranty/service hassles.
I could see spending a $20 fee to know I completely slam-dunked a $500 purchase, especially if they can regularly yield outcomes like "Our huge network of merchant data found you the bike/appliance/etc. you wanted at some tiny brick-and-mortar in Baltimore and it comes out $50 cheaper delivered than any retailer you'd consider locally." Brick-and-mortar retailers don't have to try to maintain an expensive sales and customer-service experience and convert to rack-em-high-sell-em-cheap warehouses, and no-service-required customers can skip the consultancy and go directly to them and still get a decent price.
They "advisor" service would have to be explicitly independent and no-kickbacks for this to work... so I suspect what would happen is that it would build trust for a few years, then start undermining it by taking incentives to steer business.
Here is the crux: the 'supply chain' for gathering the data from all the tiny stores in small towns, who may not even have a retail system or may not be even connected, would be intractable.
You go in, get to handle the actual product. Then, if you decide to buy, do it there via the stores affiliate link. If not, you pay the store $N on your way out.
That way the customer gets the price they want, and the store makes some money for letting them handle things.
Also helps that Apple is vertically integrated and has tight control over it's supply chain and applies MAP very uniformly.
I was thinking the same as I scanned down this thread, but I can't get past two things: 1) It's tough to for me (the customer) to have enough confidence that the showroom has all the options I should consider, and that the showroom employees are knowledgeable about them all. Without that, it's tough to commit to a flat price for browsing before I enter. 2) I can't see how this happens one store at a time. As long as there are traditional retail locations nearby, ones that let customers browse for free, customers will gravitate there. Can this business model succeed only once traditional brick and mortar retail has disappeared?
It's interesting. The online marketplace (Amazon) controls the return policy, but the sellers control the pricing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, it's distorted (particularly in the case of Amazon) by the proliferation of fake brands. And by fake brands, I do not mean fakes of well-known brands...I mean meaningless brands that do not exist, that attempt to create product differentiation that does not exist.
It's turned Amazon into the crap-pile of last resort, for me.
Medical supply is probably a different category, where expertise is more important than others. But in more common examples, when I would go to a store and already knew more about their product lines than the salespeople, the local price difference was a turnoff. I'm happy to pay a reasonable uplift if a vendor can educate, guide or support me as a customer. But when few of them can, I literally have no reason to patronize them.
As fast shipping became an option, there was less and less reason to go to a showroom other than to independently look at a product person. In 2020, I don't even care about that, because return policies are liberal.
My favorite case example is CircuitCity [1]: "In 2003, Circuit City converted to a single hourly pay structure in all stores, eliminating commissioned sales. Many previously commissioned sales associates were offered new positions as hourly "product specialists", while 3,900 salespeople were laid off, saving the company about $130 million per year. Many company insiders later revealed that they thought this was the most influential company decision that would ultimately lead to its demise."
Lowering costs by eliminating qualified and experiences salespeople, attempting to become an expertise-less local storefront competing on price with businesses that have lower costs was a suicide move, and endemic of executives attempting to run companies based _purely_ on a bottom line, without actually understanding the market they are in. "Excel Excutives" in my words.
On the other hand, I have begun doing more business with BestBuy this year. Not because they have changed their level of in store expertise, but because when I need something, they can compete with Amazon in some cases on a combination of price and convenience. I can find if their store has something, the quantity, and have it in hand with no more than drive time. In the work-from-mode many of us are in, this can be a big deal. Plus, I can get appliances from them with installation, and office furniture from their delivery services that is a bit of a gamble from Amazon, who so far is not as convenient for "big box" shipping.
I hope BB continues what they are doing, because they seem to have figured out some of the variables to _adapt._ IMO innovation is not the problem, adaptation is. No business can survive if they don't adapt to fickle consumers where a significant portion of them will always use the resources available to them while simultaneously seeking to save money.
Total opposite of Frys, or the late CompUSA or Circuit City.
Best Buy isn't packed, but they always have some activity in the locations I frequent, and they also have decent prices and good selection when you need things local.
Goes in hand with not receiving goods that are obviously used and resold with zero apparent QC.