Is this normal eg at Jessops

I recently found I'd drifted into a local Jessops store, while waiting for my better half. Anyway, when I walked in I was faced with a huge bank of Canon and Nikon gear, and no obvious sign of any Pentax gear. Not surprising, I guess. I challenged the manager why the Pentax "display" was a scrappy, tiny section with no advertising and gaps where gear should have been. His answer was revealing (to me): apparently Canon and Nikon sponsor the displays and require the competition to not be obviously displayed.

I have long held the belief that the major producers influence the camera mags reviews, and pay little attention to them - why wouldn't this be the case, in reality, as they receive so much advertising revenue from them ?

So when the high street is actively distorting the market, and I suspect the magazine producers too, how, without massive investment, are Ricoh going to break this stranglehold ? Great and different gear will always appeal to discerning buyers, but the dominance of Canon/Nikon will prevail and investment in the Pentax brand from 3rd party producers will be limited.

I take every opportunity (sad) to berate the likes of Jessops when I feel in the mood, with the naive hope that someday they might consider themselves an independent photographic supplier and not just an extension of the major's marketing departments. Are other's feeling this sadly afflicted ?

Good thing SRS (and WEX) serve us so well on-line - shame they are not near me to handle any new toys when I next want to be tempted...

Do you think products like lager and cider are at the main entrance of Tescos or that products by Heinz are at eye level on the shops whilst own brand is at bottom because shelf because the heinz products have a better profit margin.

Producers pay with larger discount rates to get products on key shelving and end aisle and main entrance to sell more product. The same will be true in Jessops, Currys, PC Word etc in fact any kind of national chainstore will sell premium shelving space via discounts.

So why should Jessops be any different, Pentax is not a big player in the DSLR market so the budget to compete for premium shelf space is obviously going to be less than canikon, hence the cupboard in the corner. To be fair last time I went into Jessops they actually had nearly the whole range of bodies, accessories and lenses for Pentax in stock, this was in Manchester Jessops. It wasn't that long ago that you hardly found any Pentax hardware on the shell, particularly in Northern parts of the UK.

Jessops job is to sell cameras and make a profit, it wasn't long ago when they went down the pan and thank goodness Dragon's Den Peter bailed them out and reinvested in the business and given what happened with the bankruptcy etc I can understand why they give premium shelving to canon and nikon.

I also don't understand why anyone buys a particular brand of camera to buy third party lenses, this provides the manufacturer with no income stream. If you want Pentax to bring out more exciting new products then buy their lenses and accessories, thats how you support your camera brand.

I was once told by 'The London Camera Exchange' staff that C AND N buy up most of the display shelf space which leaves little else for the likes of Pentax, Olympus and others.
I'm sure the same applies at jessops with C, N and S

I agree with what you're saying, Gary, that's the way things are nowadays, however I have used to go into Jessops looking for Pentax cameras and lenses, found none (in Oxford) so my business went to other retailers. From my perspective Jessop's lost market share partly because they didn't offer customers a genuine choice. Like you say, their job is to sell cameras. Well, track record proves they were laterally not very good at it, not least because the took the silver shilling from Canon and Nikon. Customer's rightly look for impartiality in any agency, retail or otherwise, so if New Jessops don't offer that, they don't sell to me.

I also agree, it is best to buy camera maker's lenses,I always do. The irony is that I could actually be buying a rebadged Tamron or Tokina . No matter, most of my Pentax gear is true Pentax, and anyway, their colaboration with Tokina yeilds excellent results.

The reason Jessops went downhill was because they actually never stocked anything as most manufacturers closed down their lines of credit with Jessops. Since being taken over by Peter Jones they have lots of stock in of many brands.

The problem for Pentax under Hoya was that most distributors weren't treat very well by Hoya and left the brand in droves. Restoring that goodwill by Ricoh is going to be very difficult, they have achieved the first hurdle in getting Jessops back on board the brand, hopefully others will follow. Here up north the number of camera shops falling by the wayside is truly shocking, we have non in Grimsby, our nearest is in Cleethorpes and even they now stock Pentax so things are definitely improving I feel under Ricoh.

There's no nice "Queensbury Rules" in business. Dog eat dog and corruption will seep through any cracks in the hull.

I wasn't picking on Jessops, particularly. I was a customer of theirs back in the earlier 80's in their first store in Leicester, when I travelled down from Nottingham as astudent - I funded my degree from the proceeds of this equipment. I was sad, but not surprised, to see them fail. I hope they succeed this time. But, it is the blatent product placement and partial advice that saddens me.

My comments about promoting the Pentax brand when I visited their stores was just a futile attempt to try and make then notice non canon/Nikon buyers. The more we make these comments as a group the better, eh ?

I agree about buying Pentax gear - i'm 100% Pentax. However, it would be nice to be able to fill the odd hole that Pentax does not cover.

Apologies for poor typing - on tiny mobile device ...

Last time I was in the Manchester store earlier this year they had brand specific sale advisors for each brand they stocked and the Pentax guys where very very informed about the brand. I was really impressed with this, it was like fresh air as my past experience in Jessops where truly dreadful and I wouldn't hesitate to go back to Jessops Manchester branch again.

Don't praise Wex too much. Their showroom is dominated by the main two as well. Pentax is relegated to one small glass cabinet (albeit next to the counter) amongst a sea of Canikon.

Tis a shame. I bought into Pentax because my local Jessops (alas now only a distant memeory) had a good deal on a K100D plus Tamron 70-300. My research (mostly DPR!) had alerted me to the advantages of Pentax-IBIS, excellent backwards compatability, and memories of an ancient Spotmatic owned by my older brother and a number of digitally redundant Canon FD lenses prompted me to become a digital Pentaxian

I went into jessops Shrewsbury to ask to see the Pentax Q....the 'salesman' had to look it up on the internet to find out what it was!

Never again!

Today I was in PC World trying to buy a rather expensive laptop and practically waiving a wad of cash around.

The manager effectively put us in a queue and after another 10 minutes we gave up and walked out.

The shop was full of staff, but we started to realise how few of them worked for PC World. There were staff from Google and Apple in abundance but they couldn't help us.

And that's the way it will become. Soon when you walk into Jessops you'll have Canon employees, Nikon employees and one or two people left for everyone else.

But without Canon and Nikon there would be no camera shops at all!