London camera exchange.

Just been in London camera exchange Worcester and all their Pentax stuff is gone, according to sales assistant the group as a whole is stopping selling new Pentax. All that was there was a couple of second hand lenses. So in effect there is no Pentax high Street presence at all, how are they ever going to grab more of the market.

Jessops show a good range of Pentax bodies and lenses on their web site, and for many of them it says you can "Collect in Store". However, I don't know whether that means they have them on show in stores, as there isn't one in my home town.

Philip

Very few places now, but Clifton Cameras, Walton Cameras, SRS and, to some extent, Park Cameras still have good stocks. I've never found LCE to be very good for Pentax.

It was covered on another thread, a couple of months ago that the Pentax presence was disappearing from Jessops.

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/jessops-sound-the-death-knell-for-pentax-...

LCE Worcester was their regional Pentax centre so not good if they are dropping Pentax now. I went into Jessops Birmingham today and no Pentax there, but then again no Leica or Hasselblad either! Neither did they have a very good range of camera bags so I came away frustratingly empty-handed. Although a decent sized store it was all decidedly midrange stock which I suppose is what sells most. I might try the Calumet store sometime.

I'm not surprised with jessop s some off there staff don't even know what a 2x converter is

lCE in Chester had no Pentax, no Olympus, no Panasonic, no Fuji, no Leica or anything else except Canon, Nikon and Sony. They said nothing else sells except those three, I asked how can you sell something if you don't stock it....they just walked off

LCE never did stock much Pentax. I think you can order and collect from Jessops.
In Scotland the only retailer where you can get your mits on gear is Merchant City Cameras in Glasgow.
York Camera Mart carries a good range of Pentax cameras and lenses.

Curious then that Jessops had Panasonic, Olympus, Fuji as well as the big three.
Same attitude in Leamington LCE, when I went in to first ask about a DSLR they showed me a Canon and Nikon. TBH I had always fancied a Nikon but when I picked one up it was a real disappointment, I thought the company had gone the way of Grundig etc and had the name pasted on a cheap Chinese knock-off. Back then (about 3 years ago) there was a small display of Pentax so I asked if I could try one, but the chap wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't asked. Chalk and cheese. Anyhow since then they have stopped stocking Pentax because 'no-one asks for one'. This seems to be the standard mantra of lazy retailers who are less interested in offering customer choice than making an easy sale. Or maybe the others offer more extended credit.

think pentax need to take a leaf out off panasonics book and team up with ether national trust or english heritage where they had a road show with the cameras where you could try one for a couple off hours with a memory card which you got to keep as well as an 6x12 print off one off the photos you took that day

Last time I was in there I asked about used Pentax stuff, and they said the main reason they don't have any is that they didn't sell Pentax stuff new there, so people trading in wouldn't be coming there.

Camera Solutions has pretty much everything Pentax in Chester. Most of the big high street chains are just box shifters, selling what they have to people who may not know what they really need.

Reminds me of my father once grumbling about the local ironmonger. Dad had gone to the shop to try to buy something slightly out-of-the-ordinary:
"We don't stock those."
"Why?", asked father.
"No demand for them."
"How do you know that there is no demand?"
"We have never sold any."

I used to work for Wilkinson Cameras in Liverpool (not a fun experience to be honest, very old-school mentality and uncompetitive prices) and we had a decent range of Pentax gear. Went back recently and it was all gone, just wasn't selling at all.

Honestly I think their UK marketing is absolute toss. It'd cost them hardly anything to do some decent social media marketing but all we get is dull, generic sales pitches and Bill Ward/Matt Emmett over and over again (excellent photographers but it gets repetitive). This is literally the ONLY OTHER COMPANY making true DSLRs outside of the big two, they could be doing so much more...

Truth there.