KORBINIAN - The dealer crisis...

Hello folks in digital wasteland,

today I want to talk about our most favorite individuals in magic. The dealers, who provide us with our drugs, with the wonders to which we are addicted.

Until last year I worked at a little shop, supervising the magic corner and selling magic tricks. So I got in touch with quite a lot of magic dealers and I still like talking with them. But in the last years most of the time when I am talking with them , they start to complain about everything. Their customers, the internet, other dealers and all this other shit. Oh I forgot, most of their hate is directed towards China, this evil country, so full of copys.

But firmly believe this problem is selfmade. For years the dealers deceived their customers, selling them tricks they never needed or could perform. And now the customers went of to buy in the internet. How did this come to be?

Simply because they bought their tricks because of the texts in the catalogue, opened the box, just to find out, that it was a piece of crap, unperformable by anyone.

But now the situation has changed, now we can look at demo-videos before we spent our money. So the situation seemed to change in favor of the the customer, but how deceiving the things can be.

Now we are confronted with videos, which are edited, so they deceive us more than any text before. And even more, some people even really lie. For example this really nice fellow Hugo Leclercq, a collegue of the famous Kevin Parker.
He posts a video on this wonderful platform of self-advertisment, youtube, of a selfinvented pencil through bill penetration, which he calls Illegal, another topic about which I could rant for hours, and parallel he starts a discussion in this other platform for lonely nerds, learnmagictricks, about this trick. And if you read the discussions going on there, there is only one possible way to accomplish this miracle. To have a hole, which you can transfer anywhere you like. A real miracle. Such a shit.

So why is anyone wondering, that the customers started downloading magic tricks. For years dealers ripped them of with their tricks. Now the customers strike back. Yes there is a lot of collateral damage, not all dealers or inventors sell that much crap, but as long as dealers sell the crap alongside the good stuff, how can the customers see the difference.

And a last point. Most magicians don't buy tricks to perform them. Most just buy tricks to know their workings. So since most of the present market seems to be dominated by DVDs just teaching secrets, they are easily stolen. Try to download a head chopper, or even a pack of cards. But this unfinished ideas, which flood the market, are just ideas and they can easily be stolen.

So to you dealers, begin to treat your customers with honesty and they will buy from you again. And I know not all of you are scoundrels.

So have a nice weekend.

Korbinian