My wife and I recently spent a few days with friends on Long Island,
NY, and I took a day to visit Manhattan, in part to see a couple
well-known camera stores.
First stop was B&H. A doorman greeted me and let me in, then there
were two more gentlemen (could one almost say bouncers?) to pass before
entering the sales area. Once in, I stopped and did some mental
arithmetic: 6 men behind that counter, 8 behind that one, 5 behind
another, 8 in front of another, and on and on. Except for a few
cashiers, all were males. There seemed to be close to 100 people
WORKING there. I mentioned that to a salesman, and he simply said
that they add a couple dozen more on Sunday, when it's wall to wall
people in there. Wow.
Digital cameras were out on counters (cabled, of course) to hold and
examine. The variety was impressive. Lenses and bodies behind glass at
the sales counters, however, seemed pretty scarce. I walked upstairs to
the single room with used equipment, and here again I was surprised at
the lack of rows and rows of lenses, bodies, flashes, bellows, whatever,
on display. If one wanted a T-20 OM flash, it may well have been there
somewhere in inventory; it wasn't out on display, however.
I bought a couple books on photographing, of all things, insects.
Otherwise I escaped with my credit card quite intact. Actually buying
something was a new experience: I gave a used book I wanted to buy to a
salesman, he scanned it and gave me a receipt, and then the book went
into a plastic crate on a conveyor to a pick-up area on the first
floor. I couldn't simply carry it down to pay for it. Back on the
first floor, I paid the cashier from the receipt, and then I had to go
to the pick-up area and wait a few minutes for the book to
roller-coaster its way down from the second floor.
Adorama was only a moderate walk away. I bought my first OM4T from
them 20-some years ago. Size was nothing like B&H, and, really, there
was less out on display to buy than at West Photo or National Camera
Exchange here in Minneapolis.
The next day I visited Cameta Camera in Amityville, Long Island.
Despite the Manhattan skyline 20 miles away, it's a small-town store.
This is where I bought my new E-1 (BIN'd at Cameta's ebay auctions) and
used Nikon FE-2, Nikon FTN, plus a Vivitar lens, all from their
website. There were about 6 salesmen behind a single counter, and
again, there weren't loads and loads of lenses under glass. Are they
all locked up, and just brought up front when one asks for a particular
lens?
I can see more lenses on display at the Twin Cities F-stop Swaps
than I saw in total at these three camera stores.
Prices, however, are much better buying from the websites of B&H,
Adorama, and Cameta than buying locally. A brick of E100VS from B&H is
about half what I'd have to pay here. I saved at least a couple hundred
dollars buying the E-1 from Cameta.
Dean
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