HMV Finally closing down for good?

Jimbeam3678 said:
It’s staggering all of the posts on here about on physical shops.

The one thing that these shops have that no online retailer can offer and is free to implement... good custumer service.

It’s beyond belief that most stores I go into don’t even acknowledge me or offer any real assitance.

If you provide a good service at a reasonable price people will come back. It’s nothing new but it’s very rarely done.

As for the free parking research has shown this is simply not true.
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Lol, people don’t want to be hassled going into a shop buying bloody DVDs.

Online smacks high street out the park for service and consumer protection such as 7 days return rule.
 
I wonder if anyone has a tally of the businesses that have collapsed since 2000, anyway, i couldnt give a **** about HMV, haven't been in there store now for 3 years and i can't even remember why i was there, probably browsing for no reason.

If it can't even hold my browsing, what's the point in it?

Let it die, just build more living space or better yet more civic areas/parks to enjoy.
 
Jimbeam3678 said:
The one thing that these shops have that no online retailer can offer and is free to implement... good custumer service.
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How on earth is that free to implement, do you think that the staff you want to fawn over you will work for free? Sales staff wages are a big overhead which is why there are hardly any, getting substituted with self service tills etc..

The high street retailer is just about dead, it's evolving out of society. Who wants to go to a shop when you can do the same thing literally anywhere you like, at your convenience and at a lower cost?
 
It's a shame to see another store go, and more people out of work our town is slowly dying, We have a HMV which just survived after the initial issues, but we lost BHS in the recession and nothing ever filled the empty building as the rates were too high, Now we are losing Peacocks in February, Starbucks closed the in town restaurant and went out of town, plus all the little shops that have been around for years, before online was a thing.

Now we have talks of Sainsbury's opening a massive retail park out of town and having buildings for other retailers to use which will kill the rest off, and combine that with all of the silly traffic systems put in place which have caused the town to crawl along people just dont want to shop any more.

Amazon may be great for next day deliveries and carrying stuff others might now be able to at lower prices, but once the competition is gone Amazon can set what ever price they want and we'll just have to suck it up.
 
Well maybe the competition should actually ******* compete then, this isn't the 90s anymore, any store not having an online presence that isn't trash is pitiful. They only have themselves to blame.

But Amazon is an American Behemoth, it's existence is entirely down to the large cohesive market in the US, where as the EU is anything but cohesive and nothing of equivalence can really compete because it never even starts.

Subsidies for the High-Street that is over-stretched as it is will just be a colossal waste of money, the only solutions is for large regional economic councils to stop the drain from big shopping parks, and a focus on making it less aggravating to actually be in the city centres in the first place (not **** transport links, not **** pollution being the main issues). Since council's are greedy selfish ******, this will never happen, so even regardless of Amazon's immense convenience, it will still die.
 
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insane200 said:
It's a shame to see another store go, and more people out of work our town is slowly dying, We have a HMV which just survived after the initial issues, but we lost BHS in the recession and nothing ever filled the empty building as the rates were too high, Now we are losing Peacocks in February, Starbucks closed the in town restaurant and went out of town, plus all the little shops that have been around for years, before online was a thing.

Now we have talks of Sainsbury's opening a massive retail park out of town and having buildings for other retailers to use which will kill the rest off, and combine that with all of the silly traffic systems put in place which have caused the town to crawl along people just dont want to shop any more.

Amazon may be great for next day deliveries and carrying stuff others might now be able to at lower prices, but once the competition is gone Amazon can set what ever price they want and we'll just have to suck it up.
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The career to get into is in IT in helping creating and maintaining this sort of system .
 
insane200 said:
Now we have talks of Sainsbury's opening a massive retail park out of town and having buildings for other retailers to use which will kill the rest off, and combine that with all of the silly traffic systems put in place which have caused the town to crawl along people just dont want to shop any more.
.
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We have one of those opening soon in a town near me. It seems beer and pies don't make money any more so leasing floorspace and letting others pay the rent is the new way. Cant argue with the business sense.
Again it's out of town so will likely kill off what's left of the awful high street of Charity shops, hairdressers and Costa's.

Expensive rate in-town retail seems to be dead, pretty soon if you don't drive things are about to get a lot harder.

I expect as car ownership decreases in the future things will return to being more centralised.
 
Sparky__H said:
We have one of those opening soon in a town near me. It seems beer and pies don't make money any more so leasing floorspace and letting others pay the rent is the new way. Cant argue with the business sense.
Again it's out of town so will likely kill off what's left of the awful high street of Charity shops, hairdressers and Costa's.

Expensive rate in-town retail seems to be dead, pretty soon if you don't drive things are about to get a lot harder.

I expect as car ownership decreases in the future things will return to being more centralised.
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Did a contract gig with sainsburys in the IT side of things..
 
antijoke said:
Lol, people don’t want to be hassled going into a shop buying bloody DVDs.

Online smacks high street out the park for service and consumer protection such as 7 days return rule.
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String said:
How on earth is that free to implement, do you think that the staff you want to fawn over you will work for free? Sales staff wages are a big overhead which is why there are hardly any, getting substituted with self service tills etc..

The high street retailer is just about dead, it's evolving out of society. Who wants to go to a shop when you can do the same thing literally anywhere you like, at your convenience and at a lower cost?
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Maybe I didn’t explain myself correctly or maybe you’ve both totally missed my point.

What’s stopping bricks and mortar from offering 7 day return? I like shopping online but the main driver behind that is that sales staff offer nothing to enhance the experience and I mean nothing.

I’m not talking about adding additional staff I’m talking about them being polite, being helpful, offering advice and generally adding value to the store.

As for self service tills these don’t directly save on overheads in every store they are there to complement and generally stores uses the saved manpower to merchandise/tidy the store. These tills have been my area of expertise for around 5 although some might doubt the expert part :p

My overall point is brick and mortar have a opportunity to build a physical relationship with the shopper which surely starts at being polite and helpful? I’m struggling to think of many that do that well at the moment.
 
insane200 said:
Amazon may be great for next day deliveries and carrying stuff others might now be able to at lower prices, but once the competition is gone Amazon can set what ever price they want and we'll just have to suck it up.
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Amazon aren't the only online retailer, they have plenty of competition.
 
Forgot about Chinese competitors to Amazon, but that has it's pitfall's, though if they ever grow out of China, it would be enough pricing pressure to keep Amazon i check.
 
StriderX said:
Tesco shut it's store down, Asos is too vulnerable to UK market shocks and the rest are as i said niche.
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What makes them niche and e-bay not niche? A niche is a specialised subset of a market... I think you're misusing the term... the likes of Tesco, eBay, Microsoft, google etc.. compete with/overlap with Amazon's business

like google competes with cloud services, home automation, sells music, sells devices, has tried to compete with video too via youtube red etc..etc..

Tesco still sells food online btw...
 
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The only way for the highstreet to survive is to offer something that can't be done online. That essentially means experience shopping. Going to a town centre store should be something special, something unique, whether that's in the service that's offered, the way things are laid out or something else, but the days of just being able to slap goods out and hope for the best are long gone.

If I was trying to rescue HMV now, I'd seriously consider trying something way out there. Turn much of the stores from straightfoward retailing to live performance space, recording spaces etc for local acts, start allowing/Supporting local acts to record their material and sell it, starting with locally and slowly branch out the successful ones into other stores further afield. Start getting people in to run music lessons for children and adults, get some refreshments going, make HMV not just about other people's music, but about your own, and what you'd have, if it came off, is a national chain where it's worth going into branches in other towns because much of the driver is about the local area, the local trends and so on.

It might fail disasterously, and it might not work in every location that it has, but it would truly make it something that couldn't be replicated online, it would be an event and an experience to go into an HMV store.
 
dowie said:
What makes them niche and e-bay not niche?
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Offering a limited range of impressive products, is what i would call Apple, Microsoft and Google, it's not really Amazon's prerogative right now (talking purely retail i mean, I know MS is pushing hard against Amazon's Web Services and the only thing Google and Apple compete with is Alexa?) as Amazon is meant to be a huge market of varying degrees of goods, Ebay is the closest thing in the West to it (down more to the users ultimately, which is why it sucks for being a real competitor).
 
StriderX said:
Offering a limited range of impressive products, is what i would call Apple, Microsoft and Google, it's not really Amazon's pejorative right now (talking purely retail i mean, I know MS is pushing hard against Amazon's Web Services and the only thing Google and Apple compete with is Alexa?) as Amazon is meant to be a huge market of varying degrees of goods, Ebay is the closest thing in the West to it (down more to the users ultimately, which is why it sucks for being a real competitor).
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It think that is the issue you had there, Amazon is so much more than just a marketplace for goods!

Amazon web services IS their cash cow. They often make a loss on the e-commerce side of their business, their operating income is mostly from selling cloud services. Their main competitors there are Google and Microsoft.
 
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