PAS
That would be personalized expert service and the ability to handle the goods before buying. That's something the brick & mortar store still offers.

nospam
but not necessarily at a competitive price. stores have an overhead that an online seller does not have and almost always have higher prices, sometimes by quite a bit.

what ends up happening is people might go to a store to check out the camera or other product and then go order it online for much less. the store not only doesn't get the sale but they spent time helping someone buy elsewhere.

George Kerby
THAT is EXACTLY what people would do to me when I was a store manager for a local mom n pop store here. Even though, Nikon, Olympus and Canon would give us deals and quantity breaks in wholesale to us, folks would come in and waste hours of my and my staff's time and then leave and buy from B&H or some other mail order outfit back in the late 70's.

Like you said, a local store doesn't stay in business without something. Even though we tried to discount the hardware to match mail order, we sold accessories like filters, cases and bags at full retail to help. The REAL money came from our photofinishing operations.

Keep in mind "One Hour Labs" were not around just yet, but we could get a 24 hour turnaround with local printing and overnight Kodachrome, depending on when the customer brought in the film before courier pickup. Another pure profit area per square foot was a card rack we kept in a corner when the customer would first walk in.

Today, the trick is having a large used equipment department. The only two surviving operations here in the third most populated county in the US thrive on this, along with VERY knowledgeable staff.