Retailers under pressure – can the industry survive if they fail?
by James R. McMullin, Owner/Operator, Instructor Trainer, Signature Scuba, CA
Click here to read this article on our Flippingbook platform.
IMAGINE WAKING UP tomorrow and learning that another dive retailer has closed its doors. No air fills, no gas blending, no equipment service, no classrooms. No place for divers to gather, learn, ask questions, or enter the sport. For most of us in the industry, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario. We’re watching it happen in real time.
Across the country, dive retailers are facing increasing pressure from every direction. Rising operating costs, staffing challenges, growing regulatory burdens, direct-to-consumer competition, and shifting purchasing habits are making it harder than ever to operate a successful dive business. Recently, we experienced another example of a challenge that many retailers know all too well.
A customer entered our store looking for a mask from a brand we don’t typically stock. One of our team members spent time discussing fit, lens options, skirt materials, comfort, and usability. After trying several masks, he settled on a Hollis M1 and appeared ready to make a purchase. Then he informed us he was only using the store to evaluate his options.
His intention was to purchase online from a retailer offering a policy that allows customers to remove the lens coating, dive the mask, and return it afterward if they decide they don’t like it. When told we couldn’t offer that policy, his response was simple: “That’s why I’ll buy it online.”
Most professional dive retailers understand why such policies are unrealistic. Once life-support or personal-use equipment enters the water, it typically cannot be represented or sold as new. The result is that a retailer absorbs the cost of maintaining inventory, providing expertise, offering fitting services, training staff, and creating an environment where customers can make informed decisions, while the final sale goes elsewhere.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s becoming increasingly common, and it’s contributing to a larger industry challenge that many of us have been discussing privately for years.
The Conversation the Industry Needs to Have
The challenge extends beyond online retailers. Increasingly, manufacturers are expanding direct-to-consumer sales channels while relying on retail partners to introduce, support, demonstrate, service, and promote their products.
Paid Advertisement
Retailers are expected to maintain storefronts, compressors, service departments, inventory, trained personnel, classrooms, insurance coverage, and operational infrastructure. These investments are substantial. At the same time, manufacturers often have the ability to sell the same products directly to end users without carrying many of the costs borne by their dealer network.
Whether intentional or not, this creates growing tension within the channel and raises a difficult question: How sustainable is the traditional dive retail model when the businesses responsible for developing divers are increasingly competing with the businesses that supply them?
Retailers Don’t Just Sell Equipment. They Create Divers.
This is perhaps the most important point in the entire discussion. Online retailers don’t create divers. Manufacturers don’t certify divers. Websites don’t mentor divers. Local dive retailers do.
For decades, dive retailers have served as the entry point into our industry. They recruit new participants, teach classes, fit equipment correctly, organize trips, mentor customers, and support local communities. They create lifelong divers.
Every manufacturer, training agency, charter operation, liveaboard, and travel company benefits from the work performed at the retail level. Yet the economic realities facing retailers continue to worsen. As experienced shop owners retire and fewer entrepreneurs enter the market, the industry’s infrastructure continues to shrink.
Paid Advertisement
Why This Matters to Everyone
This isn’t a retailer problem. It’s an industry problem. If retailers continue to disappear, fewer new divers enter the sport. Certification volume, equipment sales, travel participation, and charter activity decline. Service availability declines, and local diving communities weaken.
Eventually, every segment of the industry feels the impact. Manufacturers lose customers. Training agencies lose students. Charter operators lose passengers. Liveaboards lose guests. And the industry loses future generations of divers.
The Industry Is Approaching a Crossroads
Most dive retailers did not enter this business expecting to become wealthy. They entered because they love diving and wanted to build communities around it. But passion alone does not keep the lights on.
Year after year, retailers face direct-to-consumer competition, online price pressure, rising insurance costs, increasing labor expenses, growing service expectations, higher occupancy costs, and expanding operational requirements. The pressure continues to grow, and the number of retailers continues to shrink. The question is no longer whether this trend exists. The question is what happens if it continues.
Paid Advertisement
A Message to the Entire Industry
This is not about protecting individual businesses. It’s about protecting the infrastructure that supports diving itself. The local dive retailer remains the industry’s most effective customer acquisition program, training center, service department, community hub, and brand ambassador. Once those businesses disappear, rebuilding them will be extraordinarily difficult.
The diving industry depends on far more than products. It depends on people, relationships, mentorship, education, and community. Those things cannot be shipped in a box.
This isn’t a complaint. It’s a warning, and it’s a conversation the entire industry needs to have before more of the foundation disappears.
Click here to read this article on our Flippingbook platform.
More from This Issue:
THIS MONTH’S ADVERTISING PARTNERS
Watch the Interview on Level Up for this issue:
RECENT ISSUES
MAGAZINE TOPICS