Among diving aficionados, no topic is more hotly debated than the sales of discounted diving equipment by mail. To witness the debate, you only need to tune in to the maze of Internet dive forums, where hardly a week passes without someone asking where to buy, say, a Scubapro regulator on the cheap. He'll be barraged with responses that range from vitriolic criticism for destroying his local dive shop to telephone numbers and website locations where he can save 25 percent to warnings that there will be no warranty card with it, the equipment will be defective, or he won't be able to get it serviced.
Dive shops deplore the discount houses.
They counter by emphasizing their personal service and trying to get manufacturers to guarantee that they won't condone mail order discounts of their equipment. Some manufacturers do deal exclusively with dive shops, while others say they do but turn a blind eye toward the grey market - that clandestine market where people ostensibly purchase gear to retail to consumers only to turn around and job it to mail order companies. The mail order dive business has been around as long as diving. When Skin Diver magazine became the prominent publication for divers in the 1960s, it carried the forerunner of today's mail order ads. In the 1970s, Skin Diver carried more elaborate mail order pitches for a range of gear from Honest Archie at New York's Central Skin Diving and others.