High Sierra Topix

As the Internet steamroller rolls on....one of the last real camera stores in Northern California recently announced it is closing. For decades the store has been one of the only stores with considerable gear of interest to professionals.

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016 ... in-october

A sad sign of the times. I find it interesting he didn't mention Camera West in Walnut Creek, which is the one store I would compare to Keeble and Shuchat in terms of service and the knowledge of the salespeople. Mike's still processes film and has a big selection, but their salespeople are incredibly ignorant and sometimes even rude.

but their salespeople are incredibly ignorant and sometimes even rude.

My experience with K&S was that some of their sales people were quite standoffish or straight up unfriendly, and having to compete with the cheaper prices of the Internet surprised they lasted this long.

I stopped going to K&S years ago. For a commercial enterprise they seemed oddly disinterested in actually making sales. Not to mention their prices were not even close to being competitive. It's been 10+ years but I did have some good experiences with Bear Images, also in Palo Alto. A quick look at their website though and it looks like they may have shifted from the consumer market to the commercial market.

Well, there hasn't been a camera store where I live in decades. I bought camera gear from Adorama and B+H as early as the late 80s. Remember those phone book sized Shutterbug magazines that were 90% camera store ads? Back here in the remote ranges of the boring Midwest that magazine was our window to reasonably priced used camera gear.