Farewell to HMV

[spectoremg]

Slightly off topic but the government should really do something about the tax-dodging online brigade. Amazon have a space program ffs!

[Maude]

3 minutes ago, kevvo66 said:

...... but vinyls have gone up in sales...... 

Arrrghh, they're records, I can't take any more, please just call them records! 

Not a personal dig you understand, just don't like this new trend of calling a record 'a vinyl'. Vinyl if you really must but never plural. Next folks will be buying rubbers for their car. 

Sorry kevvo66 😁

[kevvo66]

No your right records , it is I blame my son and his hipster mates ,with their fancy talk,ps no offence taken Maude 😄👍

[Normski]

I actually work for HMV in the Preston store. Enough said!!!

[Ricky 4000]

Isn't "record" just an abbreviation of "recording"?

Therefore  "vinyl" is actually more descriptive, and short for a vinyl record... ing. 😁

Edited December 29, 2018 by Ricky 4000

[Al Krow]

2 minutes ago, Normski said:

I actually work for HMV in the Preston store. Enough said!!!

You have all our sympathy right now Normski - it must be a really unsettling time for you and your colleagues. 

You will have seen what's been happening on a day to day basis better than any of us - have things been quieter than usual? Do you think management could / should have done anything differently? Has this all come as a shock / surprise or did staff know that things weren't going well?

[Al Krow]

6 minutes ago, Ricky 4000 said:

Isn't "record" just an abbreviation of "recording"?

Therefore  "vinyl" is actually more descriptive, and short for a vinyl record... ing. 😁

Vinyl is actually short for polyvinyl chloride a synthetic resin or plastic. 

It's a bit like calling a tyre "rubber". 

[Maude]

You could go into a record shop to "buy some vinyl", as you could drive to ATS to get new rubber for your car, it makes you sound like a knob but it's OK. But buying 'vinyls' or 'rubbers' is just wrong and I won't allow it 😋

Feel for you @Normski, it's a horrible position to be in. 

[casapete]

The HMV store in Hull is the last major seller of CDs in the city. Once they go then it will be so much harder to source music here, without resorting to blo*dy tax dodging Amazon etc. I’ve bought plenty of stuff from them over the years, and am really sorry for their situation right now. Same with the Debenhams / House of Fraser scenario, although our H of F store Hammonds has just got a last minute reprieve so all not lost just yet. The high street is surely doomed though, just a matter of time I’m afraid. ☹️

[Geek99]

5 hours ago, Normski said:

I actually work for HMV in the Preston store. Enough said!!!

What do you as an insider think they did wrong ?

[NancyJohnson]

There's a short/succinct piece about HMV on the Guardian website, which pretty much sums up the how we all seem to think.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/28/hmv-music-high-street-chains-record-shops

[BassBus]

When I were a lad growing up in Glasgow the places to buy records were Listen and Blogs. Always had lots of the right records. Then along came Virgin and that saw the end of Listen and Blogs. Then Virgin went to the retail graveyard but surviving through all that was HMV. I haven't seen an HMV in Edinburgh or Newcastle since the last administration and I, like so many others, buy music online now. As others have said, I'm not sure they will survive this round.

Mike Ashley might well be waiting to hoover everything up but he has some very interesting ideas about the retail industry as he testified here.

[ianrendall]

8 hours ago, spectoremg said:

Slightly off topic but the government should really do something about the tax-dodging online brigade.

And high street rental prices. Seems that landlords would rather have an empty space than reduce the rates. 

[ianrendall]

I did used to love HMV. Our local one is a bit limited, especially in the jazz area where they have barely half a rack full of the usual suspects. Went to London HMV one day and they had a whole damn ROOM of jazz the size of my entire local store. I spend hundreds on CDs most of which I still haven’t listened to! 😂

[Shambo]

5 hours ago, casapete said:

 The high street is surely doomed though, just a matter of time I’m afraid. ☹️

I've had to do a bit of research about these things over the last few years, and obviously a lot of variables come in to play, but I don't think it's necessarily doomed, more rather changing in to something different. People will still want to congregate somewhere, it's in our nature, and that place may well be in the void left on the high street. Food, drink and especially entertainment will always be a big draw, regardless of what some people say about kids these days not wanting to congregate in the pub at a weekend to watch middle aged men rock out.

The merits and pitfalls of digital media has been discussed numerous times on this forum. These days you just don't need to browse a physical shelf for a ripe desk lamp or particularly succulent foreign holiday. Showrooms for goods may replace stores, and when you've made a judicious choice for the perfect shade of green for your new pantaloons, you mightn't have to wait for it to be delivered from some foreign sweatshop either. Light industrial processes could be making a comeback on the high street! Butcher, baker and the proverbial candlestick maker. Just in time deliveries (probably by drone) of materials mean large warehouses full of cloth or wood or anything don't need to be bolted on to the back of a workspace. You might arrange an appointment to watch robots lovingly hand craft your new bycycle/washing machine/whatever, right before your very eyes, and it doesn't need to be done on an industrial estate on the edge of town. More and more people will find themselves shopping for a particular design or designer.

I've made it all sound a bit rosey I know, and my sympathies are with the retail workers who are caught up in this horrible situation.

[mikel]

Aye, the high street is dying. Personally I refuse to buy anything from Amazon and I will maintain my stance till they stop abusing their staff and pay due taxes. It is un fair competition and the reason their prices are low. 

[casapete]

Record stores have been having a hard time for decades now. I worked in one in the mid to late 70’s and even then they were challenging times for the independently owned shops. The rot started to set in when large high street retailers such as WH Smith and Woolworths decided to develop their music departments, discounting top 30 albums so aggressively that I remember at one point we couldn’t buy them for what they were being sold for in these outlets. This was then followed in the same way by the large supermarket chains too. They saw it as loss leading to get people in their shops, and this stance took out a fair few independent shops. The good ones managed to hang on somehow ( in my town Andy’s Records, Syd Scarborough’s, Virgin and HMV ) but the writing was on the wall. Gradually, the effects of massive rents, the onset of streaming / downloading and the general change in people’s attitudes to music ownership due to the internet have brought about the current situation, which for an old fogey like me who still prefers to own a hard copy of an album is very bad news indeed.

I sympathise with the 2000 odd staff of HMV, and hope you manage to move on successfully. Incidentally, does that mean Fopps stores are doomed too now? Always enjoyed the Cambridge store when visiting family there.

[Delberthot]

1 hour ago, BassBus said:

When I were a lad growing up in Glasgow the places to buy records were Listen and Blogs. Always had lots of the right records. Then along came Virgin and that saw the end of Listen and Blogs. Then Virgin went to the retail graveyard but surviving through all that was HMV. I haven't seen an HMV in Edinburgh or Newcastle since the last administration and I, like so many others, buy music online now. As others have said, I'm not sure they will survive this round.

Mike Ashley might well be waiting to hoover everything up but he has some very interesting ideas about the retail industry as he testified here.

If my memory serves me right I think that it was Virgin that killed off Tower Records

[Newfoundfreedom]

9 hours ago, chris_b said:

. . . . and don't forget Laskys.

Ahh.... How could I possibly forget Laskys

(when I've never heard of them in the first place)

[Reggaebass]

9 hours ago, chris_b said:

. . . . and don't forget Laskys.

I used to go to laskys in Tottenham Court Road every Saturday in my hifi days , you could test out all their separate amps and cabs in their sound room, great shop 🙂

[NancyJohnson]

46 minutes ago, Shambo said:

I've had to do a bit of research about these things over the last few years, and obviously a lot of variables come in to play, but I don't think it's necessarily doomed, more rather changing in to something different.

Nail bars and coffee shops aside, pretty much every generic High Street in the country is dying.

I feel that where electrical retailing needs to go is having more of a showroom and delivery type thing going down; no actual saleable stock held on the premises, so a Sony showroom, a Samsung showroom, an LG showroom etc.  Just somewhere you can go to look and test a product, quiz a salesman (although the likelihood would be that the salesman would be just as clueless as the customer), buy it and have it delivered same day (or at least within 24 hours).  If Amazon can do next day with Prime, I see no reason why manufacturers couldn't either work with them to expedite product to the customer on a next day basis or at least get their shizz together to do it themselves. 

 

[visog]

11 hours ago, Maude said:

The trouble I've always found with HMV, and this is going back a few years but into the Internet buying era, is that a bands current CD was a normal price, tenner-ish, but any of their older cd's were through the roof pricewise, where other retailers sold most older cd's for less than the current release. 

There's been quite a few artists I've got into and bought their back catalogue on the Internet, mainly amazon if cheap enough new or ebay second hand. A few times I have bought a back catalogue for £30 where in HMV it would've been a couple of hundred. 

I've been in there and seen a CD for £17.99 and gone on Amazon while in HMV and bought it for £4.

It's sad but I've had no reason to use HMV for a long time, and I don't do streaming preferring to own the physical item. 

This! Sad about peoples' jobs but HMV shamelessly whacked everything out at high prices. The occasional sale put goods at an OK level if you could make the deal combo work for you.

This situation was always a matter of when not if... top-notch pricing for obsolete media is not a sustainable business model.

[taunton-hobbit]

9 minutes ago, NancyJohnson said:

I see no reason why manufacturers couldn't either work with them to expedite product to the customer on a next day basis or at least get their shizz together to do it themselves. 

   For this to work there has to be a lot more joined-up thinking than at present.

Example - I run a high street clothing retail shop. Our main supplier has a large self-serving internet site, without warning they made all their retail outlets 

into a 'click & collect' facility, with no notice & no financial incentive - bonus to us=nil, we just pay to be here......doh.

😎

[Woodinblack]

In a way I think HMV and the like dying impacts on music. Most of the ‘different’ groups I got when younger were ones near stuff I was getting with interesting album covers. I suppose that is broken now in that I can just go and listen to it, in a way I couldn’t before and put myself off easier.

[spectoremg]

Also those pesky supermarkets started undercutting the record shops.