Carphone Warehouse closing all stores in April

antijoke

antijoke

antijoke

Caporegime
Joined
28 Jan 2003
Posts
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Location
England
News just broke on BBC breakfast

Not coronavirus related, due to the changing mobile market. All 531 stores, nearly 3,000 redundancies

I am literally shook, I met some amazing people there and was a large part of my life.

also met my GF through CPW.

Shocked
 
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Yep, all 500+ stores....

Hey, look on the bright side, we've got Brexit to come at the end of the year yet, just think of all those sunny uplands our businesses have got to look forward to...
 
Im surprised these phone stores kept going so long, using outdated sales techniques they didnt move with the times. People do it all online now anyway.
 
Not surprised, we went in to look at phones before getting a contract with 3 over the phone. Just to see sizes shapes etc, and they hardly had any but had 3 staff members and we were the only ones in the shop. They didn't even try and sell us anything and we were there a good 5 to 10 minutes before they came over to see if we were OK.
 
It was good in the old days when phone designers were more creative. You had things like clamshells, slide phones, mini phones like the 8210, there was a bit of variety, so you had to go there to have a look at everything and feel it. Now, all phones are the same, just big, thin rectangular boxes with a screen on the front, no creativity anymore. You might as well just order online.
 
The wife had her contract updated and moved to sim only recently. Carphone Warehouse's offer was 100% more expensive than going to the provider directly, I can't say that this news comes as a surprise.
 
Plus phones are so expensive now that manufacturers are giving you interest free options to buy them directly (such as Samsung using Klarna for the £1400 S20 Ultra 512GB)
 
It is a real shame for those who may have thought their jobs were safe, however we reached peak mobile a long time ago and ever since then it has been a compression of the industry. The only ones to survive will be the large network owned shops, and even those are closing due to being on dead high streets and in hugely expensive shopping centres where they are down sizing some of their outlets.

When was the last time you used a high street mobile phone shop to buy something, that wasn't maybe a phone case, or a screen protector? I went in a Carphone Warehouse last year to buy a PAYG handset and ended up walking out due to the terrible knowledge of the member of staff, and bought it online instead.
 
The writting has been on the cards for a while now.

I went into a carphone store (one inside a currys) and they had two phones less than 10m apart at different prices. The carphone price, and the currys price.

Think it was an iPhone 11 (or maybe a pixel 4), it was just before Christmas. Anyway, they said they had no stock......but currys did lol so I literally walked to the other counter and bought one.

Assume the online business will carry on?

:edit: actually it was the pixel 4, because my iPhone 11 was on contract through vodafone
 
I'm not surprised, after a few years ago I went to purchase a phone for £550 and refused to sell me the phone as they are not allowed to sell high valued phones sim free, which was BS. So they tried to sell it to me on contract instead which worked out £1900 over 2 years!?!!? No...thanks, when I have an sim only contract which offers better value. So I walked out, commission based job or not. They lost my sale.

Its cheaper now to get phones directly from the manufacture. The whole industry changed when they stopped doing 12 month contract phones, which was going to screw them over in the end.
 
Didn't CPW get bundled into their local Currys / purple shirts stores a while back? That's what happened in Stafford anyway. Does it just mean that Currys / purple shirts will lose the CPW bit of their store?
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
Didn't CPW get bundled into their local Currys / purple shirts stores a while back? That's what happened in Stafford anyway. Does it just mean that Currys / purple shirts will lose the CPW bit of their store?
Click to expand...

I visited Hull a few months ago and was amazed to see the staff still wearing the purple shirts. I thought they had all changed to black ones years ago.
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
Didn't CPW get bundled into their local Currys / purple shirts stores a while back? That's what happened in Stafford anyway. Does it just mean that Currys / purple shirts will lose the CPW bit of their store?
Click to expand...

they’ve said this is stand alone stores only. Concessions stores will remain.
 
sad but understandable. online stores have deals which are a fraction/half the price of the CPW stores.

online shopping is taking over the world.
 
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