HMV Finally closing down for good?

I'm glad, the buggers have been getting away with false advertising for years.

I go in there once a month and never do they have any Jack Russells or Gramophones in stock.
 
mrbell1984 said:
I dunno I'm not a businessman but they must sell... first cut overheads.
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Is there a magic cut overheads button they can use to do this? One that means you don't have to worry about the capital costs involved with early lease terminations and redundancies? This is why firms choke on things like this. They end up with a large store estate they need to cut but they dont have the capital to do it (Terminating leases early and firing people is expensive) so they can only do it very slowly as leases expire.
 
PvtJoker said:
The problem with HMV has always been their prices. You could easily see the average CD in there for £18.99 or something stupid.
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I think a bigger problem is the negative image they have over price. I've not seen a CD in there for £18.99 for years - infact I was in there the other day before the 25% off sale spending irritating vouchers and the vast majority of chart CD's were £8.99ish.
 
[TW]Fox;23560065 said:
Is there a magic cut overheads button they can use to do this? One that means you don't have to worry about the capital costs involved with early lease terminations and redundancies? This is why firms choke on things like this. They end up with a large store estate they need to cut but they dont have the capital to do it (Terminating leases early and firing people is expensive) so they can only do it very slowly as leases expire.
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Yeh ask amazon to buy them out with their stacks of penniessssssssss.
 
[TW]Fox;23560079 said:
I think a bigger problem is the negative image they have over price. I've not seen a CD in there for £18.99 for years - infact I was in there the other day before the 25% off sale spending irritating vouchers and the vast majority of chart CD's were £8.99ish.
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Their Blu-ray prices are hilarious though. Anything out of a "2 for £15" offer or something is still at full RRP, so nearly £20, even if it has been out for months.
 
[TW]Fox;23560038 said:
Adapt how?
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Easy. The model thats broken isnt high-street vs internet, its shelf-stacked-boxes vs search-orientated-informative.

Look at the BluRay section in HMV, they stick every single one in alphabetical order. No genres, no recommendations, no separation of tv, film, anime etc. Just a shelf of alphabetised disk based media products. From a customer perspective its absolutely wholly 100% useless. I can, from the comfort of my living room, google a specific film, find out facts and figures about it, read reviews, check what formats its available in etc. Go into a HMV, and you get shelves of boxes. There is zero optimisation, zero information and zero customer experience.

You want to fix HMV, you bin the whole bloomin model. Its outdated, out moded and irrelevant to the consumer needs of today.
 
Jono8 said:
Their Blu-ray prices are hilarious though. Anything out of a "2 for £15" offer or something is still at full RRP, so nearly £20, even if it has been out for months.
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Looking at Amazon they are not hugely cheaper for Blu-ray, it seems to be an expensive format wherever you look. Some of them are as much as 25 quid on Amazon. New Release movies seem to be 15 quid so after postage, unless you want SuperSaver, its only a few quid cheaper.

Look at the BluRay section in HMV, they stick every single one in alphabetical order. No genres, no recommendations, no separation of tv, film, anime etc. Just a shelf of alphabetised disk based media products
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It seemed to be in sections like 'TV' and 'Comedy' and 'Thriller' etc last time I looked? There was even a small 'Anime' section as I remember commenting on Anime as a result :p
 
[TW]Fox;23560111 said:
Looking at Amazon they are not hugely cheaper for Blu-ray, it seems to be an expensive format wherever you look. Some of them are as much as 25 quid on Amazon. New Release movies seem to be 15 quid so after postage, unless you want SuperSaver, its only a few quid cheaper.
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What is wrong with supersaver? :p

It is not just prices though really, it is what they stock. My friends dad had a hmv voucher for xmas and we went shopping for him to find two cd's he wanted. Neither were particularly "niche" and i was actually quite surprised that the HMV we visited ( a large one) stocked neither.

We came home and found both on Amazon for a very good price (cheaper than HMV online) and they were delivered for free within a few days.
 
HMV should have given up the ghost a couple of years ago. Shame to see so many people potentially lose their jobs but hopefully this will make retailers take note.
 
[TW]Fox;23560079 said:
I think a bigger problem is the negative image they have over price. I've not seen a CD in there for £18.99 for years - infact I was in there the other day before the 25% off sale spending irritating vouchers and the vast majority of chart CD's were £8.99ish.
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Never paid much attention to the chart cds but just about everything else was way overpriced. They dug their own grave in that respect.
 
name89 said:
hopefully this will make retailers take note.
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Of what? Please give it a tad more thought before saying 'of the fact they should slash all the prices11111one' :p

Retailers like this fail for a myriad of complicated reasons of which price is just one small part (sometimes even the cheapest retailers can fail, sometimes BECAUSE they are selling stock for too little). Everything from business structure to store portfolio to leasing costs to agreements with banks to competitor activity all play a part. There is no simple and easy fix. There is no obvious magic button they should simply press. Retail already knows what the challenges are, it doesn't need the failure of yet another 100 year old chain to remind them.

It seems that in threads like this people take pleasure in watching these firms fail, convinced that the answer is simple and that they know exactly how it should have been fixed..
 
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PvtJoker said:
The problem with HMV has always been their prices. You could easily see the average CD in there for £18.99 or something stupid.
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Regardless of prices I think the shopping experience is worse than online, I can't preview a CD or watch a trailer of a movie. Browsing DVD cases is no better in a shop. (Even ignoring downloads)

The high street has to offer things that people can't get online, such as shoes or clothes which are harder to buy online.

Or go all out for brilliant service like John Lewis so you will just go there by default when you need something.
 
PvtJoker said:
The problem with HMV has always been their prices. You could easily see the average CD in there for £18.99 or something stupid.
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But why were they that price? Because overheads are too high for retail to exist in its current form any more. Blame local councils and shopping centre owners for their high unit fees, blame taxation, blame the government, hell blame people for being savvy and shopping elsewhere like the Internet.

All HMV were doing was trying to keep its head above water in a market that was becoming increasingly challenging. Which was destined to fail, and it has making them the next in a long and growing list of retail casualties. :(
 
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